jeudi, 09 mai 2019

Writing Europeans Out of Their Own History

The indigenous European people are being written out of their own history, folklore and mythology by those who wish to re-write history and strip Europeans of their traditions and culture in order to propagate the lie that Europe was always multicultural and that people who did not originate in Europe have played pivotal roles in European history, and crucially that non-Europeans have a right to stake their claim to European soil.

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mardi, 20 septembre 2016

Rightist Critique of Racial Materialism

While France and England gave materialistic, anti-traditional expressions to the concept of “the people” that was taking shape since the French Revolution, German Idealism was a return to a spiritual, metaphysical direction. The German Revolution moved in a volkish direction, where the volk was seen as the basis of the state, and the notion of a volk-soul that guided the formation and development of nations became a predominant theme that came into conflict with the French bourgeois liberal-democratic ideals derived from Jacobinism. Fichte had laid the foundations of a German nationalism in 1807-1808 with his Addresses to the German Nation. Although like possibly all revolutionaries or radicals of the time, beginning under the impress of the French Revolution, by the time he had delivered his addresses to the German nation, he had already rejected Jacobinism. Johann Heder had previously sought to establish the concept of the volk-soul, and of each nation being guided by a spirit. This was a metaphysical conception of race, or more accurately volk, that preceded the biological arguments of the Frenchman Count Arthur de Gobineau. Herder stated that the volk is the only class, and includes both King and peasant, and that “the people” are not the same as the rabble that are championed by Jacobinism and later Marxism.

French and English racism was introduced to Germany by the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain who had a seminal influence on Hitlerism. English Darwinism, a manifestation of the materialistic Zeitgeist that dominated England, was brought to Germany by Ernst Haeckel; although Blumenbach had already begun to classify race according to cranial measurements during the 18th century. Nonetheless, biological racism reflects the English Zeitgeist of materialism. It provided primary materialistic doctrines to dethrone Tradition. Its application to economics also provided a scientific justification for the “class struggle” of both the capitalistic and socialistic varieties. Hitlerism was an attempt to synthesis the English eugenics of Galton and the evolution of Darwin with the metaphysis of German Idealism. Italian Traditionalist Julius Evola attempted to counter the later influence of Hitlerian racism on Italian Fascism by developing a “metaphysical racism,” and the concept of the “race of the spirit,” which has its parallels in Spengler, whose approach to race is in the Traditionalist mode of the German Idealists.

Because the Right, the custodian of Tradition within the epoch of decay, has been infected by the spirit of materialism, there is often a focus on secondary symptoms of culture disease, such as in particular immigration, rather than primary symptoms such as usury and plutocracy. “Race” becomes a matter of skull measuring, rather than spirit, élan and character. Hence the character of a civilisation and of a people is discerned via the types of bone and skull found amidst the ruins. History then becomes a matter of counting and measuring and statistics. How feeble such attempts remain is demonstrated by the years of controversy surrounding the racial identity of Kennewick Man in North America, having first thought to have been a Caucasian, and now concluded to have been of Ainu/Polynesian descent. The Traditionalist does not discount “race”. Rather it plays a central role. How “race” is defined is another matter.

Trotsky called “racism” “Zoological materialism”. As an “economic materialist”, that is, a Marxist, he did not explain why his own version of materialism is a superior mode of thinking and acting than the other. They arose, along with Free Trade capitalism, out of the same Zeitgeist that dominated England at the time, and all three refer to a naturalistic life as struggle. The Traditionalist rejects all forms of materialism. The Traditionalist does not see history as unfolding according to material, economic forces, or racial-biological determinants. The Traditionalist sees history as the unfolding of metaphysical forces manifesting within the terrestrial. Spengler, although not a Perennial Traditionalist, intuited history over a broad expanse as a metaphysical unfolding. Although a man of the “Right”, he rejected the biological interpretation of history as much as the economic. So did Evola.

The best known exponents of racial determinism were of course German National Socialists, the reductionist doctrine being expressed by Hitler:

“…This is how civilisations and empires break up and make room for new creations. Blood mixture, and the lowering of the racial level which accompanies it, are the one and only cause why old civilisations disappear…”

The USA provided a large share of racial theorists of the early 20th century, whose conception of the rise and fall of civilisation was based on racial zoology, and in particular on the superiority of the Nordic not only above non-white races, but above all sub-races of the white, such as the Dinaric, Mediterranean and Alpine. Senator Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi wrote a book championing the cause of segregation, and more so, the “back-to-Africa” movement, stating that miscegenation with the Negro will result in the fall of white civilisation. He briefly examined some major civilisations. Bilbo wrote that Egyptian civilisation was mongrelised over centuries, “until a mulatto inherited the throne of the Pharaohs in the Twenty-fifth dynasty. This mongrel prince, Taharka, ruled over a Negroid people whose religion had fallen from an ethical test for the life after death to a form of animal worship”. This should be “sufficient warning to white America!” Because Sen. Bilbo had started from an assumption, his history was flawed. As will be shown below, it was Taharka and the Nubian dynasty that renewed Egypt’s decaying culture, which had degenerated under the white Libyan dynasties. Sen. Bilbo proceeds with similar brief examinations of Carthage, Greece, and Rome.

Julius Evola, while repudiating the zoological primacy of “racism” as another form of materialism and therefore anti-Traditional, suggested that a “spiritual racism” is necessary to oppose the forces seeking to turn man into an amorphous mass; as interchangeable economic units without roots; what is now called “globalisation”.

Evola gives the Traditionalist viewpoint when stating that there “have been many cases in which a culture has collapsed even when its race has remained pure, as is especially clear in certain groups that have suffered slow, inexorable extinction despite remaining as racially isolated as if they were islands”. He gives Sweden and The Netherlands as recent examples, pointing out that although the race has remained unchanged, there is little of the “heroic disposition” those cultures possessed just several centuries previously. He refers to other great cultures as having remained in a state as if like mummies, inwardly dead, awaiting a push “to knock them down”. These are what Spengler called Fellaheen, spiritually exhausted and historically passé. Evola gives Peru as an example of how readily a static culture succumbed to Spain. Hence, such examples, even as vigorous cultures such as that of the Dutch and Scandinavian, once wide-roaming and dynamic, have declined to nonentities despite the maintenance of racial homogeneity.

The following considers examples that are often cited as civilisations that decayed and died as the result of miscegenation.

Greek

A case study for testing the miscegenation theory of cultural decay is that of the Hellenic. The ancient Hellenic civilisation is typically ascribed by racial theorists as being the creation of a Nordic culture-bearing stratum. The same has been said of the Latin, Egyptian, and others. Typically, this theory is illustrated by depicting sculptures of ancient Hellenes of “Nordic” appearance. Such depictions upon which to form a theory are unreliable: the ancient Hellenes were predominantly a mixture of Dinaric-Alpine-Mediterranean. The skeletal remains of Greeks show that from earliest times to the present there has been remarkable uniformity, according to studies by Sergi, Ripley, and Buxton, who regarded the Greeks as an Alpine-Mediterranean mix from a “comparatively early date.” American physical anthropologist Carlton S. Coon stated that the Greeks remain an Alpine/Mediterranean mix, with a weak Nordic element, being “remarkably similar” to their ancient ancestors.

American anthropologist J. Lawrence Angel, in the most complete study of Greek skeletal remains starting from the Neolithic era to the present, found that Greeks have always bene marked by a sustained racial continuity. Angel cited American anthropologist Buxton who had studied Greek skeletal material and measured modern Greeks, especially in Cyprus, concluding that the modern Greeks “possess physical characteristics not differing essentially from those of the former [ancient Greeks]”. The most extensive study of modern Greeks was conducted by anthropologist Aris N. Poulianos, concluding that Greeks are and have always been Mediterranean-Dinaric, with a strong Alpine presence. Angel states that “Poulianos is correct in pointing out ... that there is complete continuity genetically from ancient to modern times”. Nikolaos Xirotiris did not find any significant alteration of the Greek race from prehistory, through classical and medieval, to modern times. Anthropologist Roland Dixon studied the funeral masks of Spartans and identified them as of the Alpine sub-race. Although race theorists often stated that Hellenic civilisation was founded and maintained by invading Dorian “Nordics”, Angel states that the northern invasions were always of “Dinaroid-Alpine” type. A recent statistical comparison of ancient and modern Greek skulls found “a remarkable similarity in craniofacial morphology between modern and ancient Greeks.”

If miscegenation and the elimination of an assumed Nordic (Dorian) culture-bearing stratum cannot account for the decay of Hellenic civilisation, what can? Contemporary historians point out the origins. The Roman historian Livy observed:

“The Macedonians who settled in Alexandria in Egypt, or in Seleucia, or in Babylonia, or in any of their other colonies scattered over the world, have degenerated into Syrians, Parthians, or Egyptians. Whatever is planted in a foreign land, by a gradual change in its nature, degenerates into that by which it is nurtured”.

Here Livy is observing that occupiers among foreign peoples “go native”, as one might say. The occupiers are pulled downward, rather than elevating their subjects upward, not through genetic contact but through moral and cultural corruption. The Syrians, Parthians and Egyptians, had already become historically and culturally passé, or Fellaheen, as Spengler puts it. The Macedonian Greeks in those colonies succumbed to the force of etiolation. Alexander even encouraged this in an effort to meld all subjects into one Greek mass, which resulted not from a Hellenic civilisation passed along by multitudinous peoples, but in a chaotic mass from which Greece did not recover, despite the Greeks staying racially intact. Unlike the Jews in particular, the Greeks, Romans and other conquerors did not have the strength of Tradition to maintain themselves among alien cultures. Dr. W. W. Tarn stated of this process:

“Greece was ready to adopt the gods of the foreigner, but the foreigner rarely reciprocated; Greek Doura (the Greek temple in Mesopotamia) freely admitted the gods of Babylon, but no Greek god entered Babylonian Uruk. Foreign gods might take Greek names; they took little else. They (the Babylonian gods) were the stronger, and the conquest of Asia (by the Greeks) was bound to fail as soon as the East had gauged its own strength and Greek weakness.”

Spengler pointed out to Western Civilisation and the current epoch that one of the primary symptoms of culture decay is that of depopulation. It is a sign literally that a Civilisation has become too lazy to look beyond the immediate. There is no longer any sense of duty to the past or the future, but only to a hedonistic present. Polybius (b. ca. 200 B.C.) observed this phenomenon of Hellenic Civilisation like Spengler did of ours, writing:

“In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and generally a decay of population, owing to which the cities were denuded of inhabitants, and a failure of productiveness resulted, though there were no long-continued wars or serious pestilences among us. If, then, any one had advised our sending to ask the gods in regard to this, what we were to do or say in order to become more numerous and better fill our cities,—would he not have seemed a futile person, when the cause was manifest and the cure in our own hands? For this evil grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting attention, by our men becoming perverted to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life, and accordingly either not marrying at all, or, if they did marry, refusing to rear the children that were born, or at most one or two out of a great number, for the sake of leaving them well off or bringing them up in extravagant luxury. For when there are only one or two sons, it is evident that, if war or pestilence carries off one, the houses must be left heirless: and, like swarms of bees, little by little the cities become sparsely inhabited and weak. On this subject there is no need to ask the gods how we are to be relieved from such a curse: for any one in the world will tell you that it is by the men themselves if possible changing their objects of ambition; or, if that cannot be done, by passing laws for the preservation of infants”.

Do Polybius’ thoughts sound like some unheeded doom-sayer speaking to us now about our modern world? If the reader can see the analogous features between Western Civilisation, and that of Greece and Rome then the organic course of Civilisations is being understood, and by looking at Greece and Rome we might see where we are heading.

Roman

Another often cited example of the fall of civilisation through miscegenation is that of Rome. However, despite the presence of slaves and traders of sundry races, like the Greeks, today’s Italians are substantially the same as they were in Roman times. Arab influence did not occur until Medieval times, centuries after the “fall of Rome”, with Arab rule extending over Sicily only during 1212-1226 A.D. The genetic male influence on Sicilians is estimated at only 6%. The predominant genetic influence is ancient Greek. The African Haplogroup L have a less than 1% frequency throughout Italy other than in Latium, Volterra, Basilicata and Sicily where there are frequencies of 2% to 3% . Sub-Saharan, that is, Negroid, mtDNA have been found at very low frequencies in Italy, albeit marginally higher than elsewhere in Europe, but date from 10,000 years ago. This study states: “….mitochondrial DNA studies show that Italy does not differ too much from other European populations”. Although there are small regional variations, “The mtDNA haplogroup make-up of Italy as observed in our samples fits well with expectations in a typical European population”.

Hence, an infusion of Negroid or Asian genes during the epoch of Rome’s decline and fall is lacking, and the reasons for that fall cannot be assigned to miscegenation. What slight frequency there is of non-Caucasian genetic markers entered Rome long before or long after the fall of Roman Civilisation. There was no “contamination of Roman blood”, but of Roman spirit and élan.

Alien immigration introduces cultural elements that dislocate the social and ethical basis of a Civilisation and aggravate an existing pathological condition. The English scholar Professor C. Northcote Parkinson, writing on the fall of Rome, commented that the Roman conquerors were subjected “to cultural inundation and grassroots influence”. Because Rome extended throughout the world, like the present Late Western, the economic opportunities accorded by Rome drew in all the elements of the subject peoples, “groups of mixed origin and alien ways of life”. “Even more significant was what the Romans learnt while on duty overseas, for men so influenced were of the highest rank”. Parkinson quotes Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, referring to the Roman colony of Antioch:

“…Fashion was the only law, pleasure the only pursuit, and the splendour of dress and furniture was the only distinction of the citizens of Antioch. The arts of luxury were honoured, the serious and manly virtues were the subject of ridicule, and the contempt for female modesty and reverent age announced the universal corruption of the capitals of the East…”

Roman historian Livy wrote of the opulence of Asia being brought back to Rome by the soldiery:

“…it was through the army serving in Asia that the beginnings of foreign luxury were introduced into the City. These men brought into Rome for the first time, bronze couches, costly coverlets, tapestry, and other fabrics, and - what was at that time considered gorgeous furniture - pedestal tables and silver salvers. Banquets were made more attractive by the presence of girls who played on the harp and sang and danced, and by other forms of amusement, and the banquets themselves began to be prepared with greater care and expense. The cook whom the ancients regarded and treated as the lowest menial was rising in value, and what had been a servile office came to be looked upon as a fine art. Still what met the eye in those days was hardly the germ of the luxury that was coming”.

The moral decay of Rome resulted in the displacement of Roman stock, not by miscegenation, but by the falling birth-rate of the Romans. Such population decline is itself a major symptom of culture decay. The problem that it signifies is that a people has so little consciousness left as to its own purpose as a culture that its individuals do not have any responsibility beyond their own egos. Professor Tenney Frank, foremost scholar on the economic history of Rome, also considered the results of population decline, from the top of the social hierarchy downward:

“The race went under. The legislation of Augustus and his successors, while aiming at preserving the native stock, was of the myopic kind so usual in social lawmaking, and failing to reckon with the real nature of the problem involved. It utterly missed the mark. By combining epigraphical and literary references, a fairly full history of the noble families can be procured, and this reveals a startling inability of such families to perpetuate themselves. We know, for instance, in Caesar’s day of forty-five patricians, only one of whom is represented by posterity when Hadrian came to power. The Aemilsi, Fabii, Claudii. Manlii, Valerii, and all the rest, with the exception of Comelii, have disappeared. Augustus and Claudius raised twenty-five families to the patricate, and all but six disappear before Nerva’s reign. Of the families of nearly four hundred senators recorded in 65 A. D. under Nero, all trace of a half is lost by Nerva’s day, a generation later. And the records are so full that these statistics may be assumed to represent with a fair degree of accuracy the disappearance of the male stock of the families in question. Of course members of the aristocracy were the chief sufferers from the tyranny of the first century, but this havoc was not all wrought by delatores and assassins. The voluntary choice of childlessness accounts largely for the unparalleled condition. This is as far as the records help in this problem, which, despite the silences is probably the most important phase of the whole question of the change of race. Be the causes what they may, the rapid decrease of the old aristocracy and the native stock was clearly concomitant with a twofold increase from below; by a more normal birth-rate of the poor, and the constant manumission of slaves

While allusions to “race” by Professor Frank are enough for “zoological materialists” to spin a whole theory about Rome’s decline and fall around miscegenation of the “white race” with blacks and Orientals, we now know from the genetics that despite the invasions over centuries, the Italians, like the Greeks, have retained their original racial composition to the present. What Frank is describing, by an examination of the records that show a disappearance of the leading patrician families, is that Rome was in a spiritual crisis, as all civilisations are when they regard child-bearing as a burden. Traditionalists such as Evola pointed out that the “secret of degeneration” of a civilisation is that it rots from the top downward, and as Spengler pointed out, one of the primary signs of that rot is childlessness. That there were Roman statesmen with the wisdom to understand what was happening is indicated by Augustus’ efforts to raise the birth-rate, but to no avail. Of this symptom of moral decay, Professor Frank wrote:

“In the first place there was a marked decline in the birthrate among the aristocratic families. … As society grew more pleasure-loving, as convention raised artificially the standard of living, the voluntary choice of celibacy and childlessness became a common feature among the upper classes. …”

Urbanisation, the magnetic pull of the megalopolis, the depopulation of the land and the proletarianism of the former peasant stock as in the case of the West’s Industrial Revolution, impacted in major ways on the fall of Rome. A. M. Duff wrote of the impact of rural depopulation and urbanisation:

“But what of the lower-class Romans of the old stock? They were practically untouched by revolution and tyranny, and the growth of luxury cannot have affected them to the same extent as it did the nobility. Yet even here the native stock declined. The decay of agriculture. … drove numbers of farmers into the towns, where, unwilling to engage in trade, they sank into unemployment and poverty, and where, in their endeavours to maintain a high standard of living, they were not able to support the cost of rearing children. Many of these free-born Latins were so poor that they often complained that the foreign slaves were much better off than they, and so they were. At the same time many were tempted to emigrate to the colonies across the sea which Julius Caesar and Augustus founded. Many went away to Romanize the provinces, while society was becoming Orientalized at home. Because slave labour had taken over almost all jobs, the free born could not compete with them. They had to sell their small farms or businesses and move to the cities. Here they were placed on the doles because of unemployment. They were, at first, encouraged to emigrate to the more prosperous areas of the empire to Gaul, North Africa and Spain. Hundreds of thousands left Italy and settled in the newly-acquired lands. Such a vast number left Italy leaving it to the Orientals that finally restrictions had to be passed to prevent the complete depopulation of the Latin stock, but as we have seen, the laws were never effectively put into force. The migrations increased and Italy was being left to another race. The free-born Italian, anxious for land to till and live upon, displayed the keenest colonization activity.”

The foreign cultures and religions that had come to Rome from across the empire changed the temperament of the Romans masses who were uprooted and migrating to the cities; where as in the nature of the cites, as Spengler showed, they became a cosmopolitan mass. Frank writes of this:

“This Orientalization of Rome’s populace has a more important bearing than is usually accorded it upon the larger question of why the spirit and acts of imperial Rome are totally different from those of the republic. There was a complete change in the temperament! There is today a healthy activity in the study of the economic factors that contributed to Rome’s decline. But what lay behind and constantly reacted upon all such causes of Rome’s disintegration was, after all, to a considerable extent, the fact that the people who had built Rome had given way to a different race. The lack of energy and enterprise, the failure of foresight and common sense, the weakening of moral and political stamina, all were concomitant with the gradual diminution of the stock which, during the earlier days, had displayed these qualities. It would be wholly unfair to pass judgment upon the native qualities of the Orientals without a further study, or to accept the self-complacent slurs of the Romans, who, ignoring certain imaginative and artistic qualities, chose only to see in them unprincipled and servile egoists. We may even admit that had these new races had time to amalgamate and attain a political consciousness a more brilliant and versatile civilization might have come to birth.”

What is notable is not that the Romans miscegenated with Orientals, but that the uprooted, amorphous masses of the cities no longer adhered to the Traditions on which Roman civilisation was founded. The same process can be seen today at work in New York, London and Paris. Duff wrote of this, and we might consider the parallels with our own time:

“Instead of the hardy and patriotic Roman with his proud indifference to pecuniary gain, we find too often under the Empire an idle pleasure-loving cosmopolitan whose patriotism goes no further than applying for the dole and swelling the crowds in the amphitheatre”.

The Roman Traditional ethos of severity, austerity and disdain for softness that Emperor Julian attempted to reassert was greeted by “fashionable society” with “disgust”. Parkinson remarks that “there is just such a tendency in the London of today, as there was still earlier in Boston and New York”. These “world cities” no longer reflect a cultural nexus but an economic nexus, and hence one’s position is not based on how one or one’s family unfolds the Traditional ethos, but on whether or how one accumulates wealth.

Indian

India is the most commonly cited example of a civilisation that decayed through miscegenation, the invading Aryans imparting a High Culture on India and then forever falling into decay because of miscegenation with the low caste “blacks”, or Dravidians. However, Genetic research indicates that the higher castes have retained to the present a predominately Caucasian genetic inheritance.

“As one moves from lower to upper castes, the distance from Asians becomes progressively larger. The distance between Europeans and lower castes is larger than the distance between Europeans and upper castes, but the distance between Europeans and middle castes is smaller than the upper caste-European distance. … Among the upper castes the genetic distance between Brahmins and Europeans (0.10) is smaller than that between either the Kshatriya and Europeans (0.12) or the Vysya and Europeans (0.16). Assuming that contemporary Europeans reflect West Eurasian affinities, these data indicate that the amount of West Eurasian admixture with Indian populations may have been proportionate to caste rank.

“…As expected if the lower castes are more similar to Asians than to Europeans, and the upper castes are more similar to Europeans than to Asians, the frequencies of M and M3 haplotypes are inversely proportional to caste rank.

“…In contrast to the mtDNA distances, the Y-chromosome STR data do not demonstrate a closer affinity to Asians for each caste group. Upper castes are more similar to Europeans than to Asians, middle castes are equidistant from the two groups, and lower castes are most similar to Asians. The genetic distance between caste populations and Africans is progressively larger moving from lower to middle to upper caste groups.

“…Results suggest that Indian Y chromosomes, particularly upper caste Y chromosomes, are more similar to European than to Asian Y chromosomes.

“…Nevertheless, each separate upper caste is more similar to Europeans than to Asians.”

Citing further studies, “…admixture with African or proto-Australoid populations” is “occasional”.

The chaos that afflicted India seems to have been of religio-cultural type rather than racial. Despite the superficiality of dusky hues, the Indian ruling castes have retained their Caucasian identity to the present. The genetic contribution of Australoids and Africans was minor.

Egyptian

Like India, Egypt is often cited as an example of a civilisation that was destroyed primarily by miscegenation, with Negroids. However, despite the myriad of invasions and population shifts, today’s Egyptians are still more closely related genetically to Eurasia than Africa. Migrations between Egypt, Nubia and Sudan have not been extensive enough to “homogenise the mtDNA gene pools of the Nile River Valley populations”, although Egyptians and Nubians are more closely related than Egyptians and southern Sudanese. However, significant differences remain. Even now, today’s Egyptians have primary genetic affinities with Asia, and North and Northeast Africa. The least affinity is to the populations of Sub-Sahara. The Haplotype M1, with a high frequency among Egyptians, hitherto thought to be of Sub-Saharan origin, is of Eurasian origin.

Miscegenation with Nubian “slaves” and mercenaries seems unlikely to have caused Egypt’s decay. While a Nubian or “black” pharaoh is alluded to by racial-zoologists as a sign of Egyptian decay, the Nubian civilisation had an intimate connection with the Egyptian and was itself impressive and of early origins.

Nubian civilisation, with palaces, temples and pyramids, flourished as far back as 7000 B.C. 223 pyramids, twice the number of Egypt, have been found along the Nile of the Nubian culture-region. The Nubian civilisation was of notably long duration surviving until the Muslim conquest of 1500 A.D. The Egyptians have viewed the Nubians either as a “conquered race or a superior enemy”. Hence, Egyptian depictions of shackled black slaves, give a widely inaccurate impression of the Nubian. Nubians became the pharaohs of Egypt’s 25th dynasty, providing stability where previously there had been ruin caused by civil wars between warlords, ca. 700 B.C. The Nubians were the custodians of Egyptian faith and culture at a time when Egypt was decaying. They regarded the restoration of the faith of Amun as their duty. It was the Nubian dynasties (760-656 B.C.), especially the rulership of Taharqa, which revived and purified Egyptian culture and religion. It was under the “white” rule of the Libyan pharaohs of the 21st dynasty (1069-1043 B. c.) that Egypt began a sharp decline. Ptolemaic (Greek) rule (332-30 B.C.) under Ptolemy IV (222 to 205 B.C.) brought to the rich and sumptuous pharaohs’ court “lax morals and vicious lifestyle” ending in “decadence and anarchy”. Byzantine rule (395 to 640 A.D.) through Christianisation wrought destruction on the Egyptian heritage, which was succeeded by Islamic rule. Of the long vicissitudes of Egypt’s rise and fall, it was the Nubian dynasty that had restored Egyptian cultural integrity. References to Nubians on the throne of the pharaohs tell no more of the causes of Egypt’s decay than if historians several millennia hence sought to ascribe the causes of the USA’s culture retardation to Obama’s presidency as a “black”.

We see in Egypt as in Rome, the Moorish civilisation, India and others, the causes of culture decay and fall as being something other than miscegenation. The contemporary Westerner should look for answers beyond this if only because he can see for himself that the West’s decay has no relationship to miscegenation. The number of Americans describing themselves as “mixed race” was just under 9 million in 2010. Of the 3,988,076 live births in the USA in 2014 368,213 were non-white. The USA did not become the global centre of culture-pestilence because of its mixed race population. What is more significant than the percentages of miscegenation, are the percentages of population decline caused by such factors as the limitation of children, and the rates of abortion. Twenty-one percent of all pregnancies in the USA are aborted. Such depopulation statics are an indication of culture pathology.

Of Egypt’s chaos contemporary sages observed, as they did of Rome and India, a disintegration of authority, traditional religion, and the founding ethos and mythos around which a healthy culture revolves. Egypt was often subjected to invasions and to natural disasters. These served as catalysts for culture degeneration. The papyrus called The Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage, state that after invasions and what seems to have been a class war, Egypt fell apart, there was family strife, the noble families were dispossessed by the lowest castes, authority was disrespected and overthrown, lawlessness and plunder were the norm, and the nobility was attacked: “A man looks upon his son as an enemy. A man smites his brother (the son of his mother)”. Craftsmanship has become degraded: “No craftsmen work, the enemies of the land have spoilt its crafts”. There is rebellion against the Uraeus or Re. “A few lawless men have ventured to despoil the land of the kingship”. It appears that the foundations of Traditional society, god, monarch, family and land, have been caste asunder. Further, “Asiatics” have seized the land from the ancestral occupiers, and have so insinuated themselves into the Egyptian culture that one can no longer tell who is Egyptian and who is alien: “There are no Egyptians anywhere”. “Women are lacking and no children are conceived”. Evidently there is a population crisis; that perennial symptom of decay. The political and administrative structure has collapsed, with “no officers in their place”. The laws are trampled on and cast aside. “Serfs become lords of serfs”. The writings of the scribes are destroyed.

What is being described is not a sudden upheaval, although the allusion to natural disasters and Asiatic invasion would imply this. The breakdown of regal authority, civil authority, depopulation, laws, family bonds, religious faith, agriculture and the social structure, imply an epoch of decline into chaos. The social structure has been inversed, as though a communistic revolution had occurred. “He who possessed no property is now a man of wealth. The prince praises him. The poor of the land have become rich, and the possessor of the land has become one who has nothing. Female slaves speak as they like to their mistresses. Orders become irksome. Those who could not build a boat now possesses ships. “The possessors of robes are now in rags”. “The children of princes are cast out in the street”.

With this inversion of hierarchy has come irreligion and the degradation of religion. The ignorant now perform their own rites to the Gods. Wrong offerings are made to the Gods. “Right is cast aside. Wrong is inside the council-chamber. The plans of the gods are violated, their ordinances are neglected… Reverence, an end is put to it”.

Ipuwer’s admonition was not only to rid Egypt of its enemies but to return to the Traditional ethos. This meant the reinstitution of proper religious rites, and the purification of the temples. “A fighter comes forth,” Ipuwer prophesises, to “destroy the wrongs”. “Is he sleeping? Behold, his might is not seen”. The Egyptians await an avatar, the personification of the Sun God Re (which Tradition states was the first of the Pharaohs) an Arthur who sleeps but will awaken, a redeemer that is a universal symbol from the Hindu Kalki, to Jesus in the vision of John of Patmos, the Katehon of Orthodox Russia, and many others across time and place.

Ipuwer avers to Egypt having gone through such epochs, alluding to his saying nothing other than what others have said before his time.

The Pharaoh is castigated for allowing Egypt to fall into chaos, with his authority being undermined, and without taking corrective actions. The Pharaoh as God-king, in terms of Tradition, had not maintained his authority as the nexus between the earthly kingdom and the Divine. The Pharaoh had caused “confusion throughout the land”. Certainty of the social hierarchy, crowned by the God-king, is the basis of Traditional societies. It seems that Egypt had entered into an epoch of what a Westerner could today identify in our time as that of scepticism and secularism. Chaos follows with the undermining of Cosmos.

Nefer-rohu warned Pharaoh of similar chaos. Likewise there would be “Asiatic” invasions, natural disasters, Re withdrawing his light, and again the inversion of hierarchy:

“The weak of arm is now the possessor of an arm. Men salute respectfully him whom formerly saluted. I show thee the undermost on top, turned about in proportion to the turning about of my belly. It is the paupers who eat the offering bread, while the servants jubilate. The Heliopolitan Nome, the birthplace of every god, will no longer be on earth”.

It is notable, again, that Nefer-rohu identifies the chaos with the breaking of the nexus with the divine, and the social order that has become “the undermost on top”. Also of interest is that Nefer-rohu refers to a redeemer, who has a Nubian mother, uniting Egypt and driving out the Asiatics, and the Libyans (the whitest of races of the region) and defeating the rebellious. Chaos resulted not from bio-genetic-race-factors but from a falling away of the regal and religious authority. If there is a race-factor it is in regard to Nubians being the custodians of Egyptian culture in periods of Egyptian decay, analogous to the revitalising “barbarians” who wept over the decaying Roman Empire.

Islamic

Islam had its Golden Age and rich civilisation, centred in Morocco, and extending into Spain. It is in ruins like civilisations centuries prior. The cultures that flourished in Morocco, both Islamic and pre-Islamic, were Berber. The Islamic civilisation they established with the founding of the Idrisid dynasty in 788 A. D. was ended by the invasion of the Fatimids from Tunisia ca. 900 A.D. Chaos ensued. Although there was a revival of High Culture during the 11th and 14th centuries, dynasties fell in the face of tribalism. The 16th century saw a revival initiated by al-Ghalin, several decades of wars of succession after his death in 1603, and continuing decline under Saadi dynastic rule during 1627 to 1659.

Caucasoid mtDNA sequences are at frequencies of 96% in Moroccan Berbers, 82% in Algerian Berbers and 78% in non-Berber Moroccans. The study of Esteban et al found that Moroccan Northern and Southern Berbers have only 3% to 1% Sub-Saharan mtDNA. Although difficult to define, since “Berber” is a Roman, not an indigenous term, the estimate for present day Morocco is 35% to 45% Berber, with the rest being Berber-Arab mixture. The primary point is that the Moroccan civilisation had ruling classes, whether pre-Islamic or Islamic, that remained predominantly Berber-Caucasian for most of its history, whether during its epochs of glory or of decline. Miscegenation does not account for the fall of the Moorish Civilisation.

The High Culture of Moorish Spain (Andalusia) was brought to ruin and decay not by miscegenation between “superior” Spaniards” and “inferior” Moors but by the overthrow of the Moorish ruling caste. Friedrich Nietzsche had observed this culture denegation with the fall of Moorish Spain (Andalusia). Stanley Lane-Poole wrote of the history of decay:

“The land, deprived of the skilful irrigation of the Moors, grew impoverished and neglected; the richest and most fertile valleys languished and were deserted; most of the populous cities which had filled every district of Andalusia fell into ruinous decay; and beggars, friars, and bandits took the place of scholars, merchants, and knights. So low fell Spain when she had driven away the Moors. Such is the melancholy contrast offered by her history”.

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a well-travelled sage, grappled with the same problems confronting Islamic Civilisation as those Spengler confronted in regard to The West. A celebrated scholar, political adviser, and jurist, Ibn Khaldun’s domain of influence extended over the whole Islamic world. His major theoretical work is Muqaddimah (1377), intended as a preface to his universal history, Kitabal-Ibar, where he sought to establish basic principles of history by which historians could understand events. His theory is cyclic and morphological, based on “conditions within nations and races [which] change with the change of periods and the passage of time”. Like Evolahe was pessimistic as to what can be achieved by political action in the cycle of decline, writing that the “past resembles the future more than one drop of water another”.

Ibn Khaldun stated that history can be understood as a recurrence of similar patterns motivated by the drives of acquisition, group co-operation, and regal authority in the creation of a civilisation, followed by a cycle of decay. These primary drives become distorted and lead to the corrupting factors of luxury and domination, irresponsibility of authority and decline.

Like Spengler, in regard to the peasantry, Ibn Khaldun traces the beginning of culture to group or familial loyalty starting with the simple life of the rural - and desert – environments. The isolation and familial bonds lead to self-reliance, loyalty and leadership on the basis of mutual respect. Life is struggle, not luxury. According to Ibn Khaldun, when rulership becomes centralised and divorced from such kinship, free reign is given to luxury and ease. Political alliances are bought and intrigued rather than being based on the initial bonds and loyalties. Corruption pervades as the requirements of luxury increase. The decadence starts from the top, among the ruling class, and extends downward until the founding ethos of the culture is discarded, or exists in name only.

Ibn Khaldun begins from the organic character of the noble family in describing the analogous nature of cultural rise and fall, caused by a falling away of the original creative ethos with each successive generation:

“The builder of the family’s glory knows what it cost him to do the work, and he keeps the qualities that created his glory and made it last. The son who comes after him had personal contact with his father and thus learned those things from him. However, he is inferior to him in this respect, inasmuch as a person who learns things through study is inferior to a person who knows them from practical application. The third generation must be content with imitation and, in particular, with reliance upon tradition. This member is inferior to him of the second generation, inasmuch as a person who relies upon tradition is inferior to a person who exercises judgment.

“The fourth generation, then, is inferior to the preceding ones in every respect. Its member has lost the qualities that preserved the edifice of its glory. He despises those qualities. He imagines that the edifice was not built through application and effort. He thinks that it was something due to his people from the very beginning by virtue of the mere fact of their descent, and not something that resulted from group effort and individual qualities. For he sees the great respect in which he is held by the people, but he does not know how that respect originated and what the reason for it was. He imagines it is due to his descent and nothing else. He keeps away from those in whose group feeling he shares, thinking that he is better than they”.

For Ibn Khaldun’s “generation” we might say with Spengler “cultural epoch”. Ibn Khaldun addresses the causes of this cultural etiolation, leading to the corrupting impact of materialism. Again, his analysis is remarkably similar to that of Spengler and the decay of the Classical civilisations:

“When a tribe has achieved a certain measure of superiority with the help of its group feeling, it gains control over a corresponding amount of wealth and comes to share prosperity and abundance with those who have been in possession of these things. It shares in them to the degree of its power and usefulness to the ruling dynasty. If the ruling dynasty is so strong that no-one thinks of depriving it of its power or of sharing with it, the tribe in question submits to its rule and is satisfied with whatever share in the dynasty’s wealth and tax revenue it is permitted to enjoy. ... Members of the tribe are merely concerned with prosperity, gain and a life of abundance. (They are satisfied) to lead an easy, restful life in the shadow of the ruling dynasty, and to adopt royal habits in building and dress, a matter they stress and in which they take more and more pride, the more luxuries and plenty they acquire, as well as all the other things that go with luxury and plenty.

“As a result the toughness of desert life is lost. Group feeling and courage weaken. Members of the tribe revel in the well-being that God has given them. Their children and offspring grow up too proud to look after themselves or to attend to their own needs. They have disdain also for all the other things that are necessary in connection with group feeling.... Their group feeling and courage decrease in the next generations. Eventually group feeling is altogether destroyed. ... It will be swallowed up by other nations.

Ibn Khaldun refers to the “tribe” and “group feeling” where Spengler refers to nations, peoples, and races. The dominant culture becomes corrupted through its own success and its culture become static; its inward strength diminishes in proportion to its outward glamour. Hence, the Golden Age of Islam is over, as are those of Rome and Athens. New York, Paris, and London are in the analogous cultural epochs to those of Fez, Rome and Athens. The “world city” becomes the focus of a world civilisation that ends as cosmopolitan and far removed from its founding roots. Our present “world-cities’” – in particular, New York and The City of London - are the control centres of world politics, economics, and mass-culture by the fact of their also being the centres of banking. These world-cities are the prototypes for a world civilisation that continues to be called “Western”, under the leadership of the USA, a rotting centre like Fez and Rome.

The Muslim determination of what is “progress” and what is “decline” has a spiritual foundation:

“The progressiveness or backwardness of society at any given point of time is determinable in relative terms. It can be compared to other contemporary societies [like the Spenglerian method] or to its own state in the past. … for Muslim society although economic progress is not frowned upon, it is placed lower on the order of priorities as compared to other factors; e.g. the acquisition of knowledge or the provision of justice. There is also a tradition (Hadis) of the Holy Prophet that lists the symptoms of society that is in a pathological state of decline. These outward symptoms point to an underlying malaise in the society but can also provide a useful starting point for corrective actions for stopping or reversing the onset of decline”. The high and low points of Muslim civilisation can be identified as those of a “Golden Age” or of an “Abyss”.

Comparable to the warnings of other sages, in an epoch of decline again there is an inversion of hierarchy, or more specifically here, of character, the Hadith stating that those in such a society would be corrupted, while others might resist within themselves:

“There will be soon a period of turmoil in which the one who sits will be better than one who stands and the one who stands will be better than one who walks and the one who walks will be better than one who runs. He who would watch them will be drawn by them. So he who finds a refuge or shelter against it should make it as his resort”.

Hebrew “Race”

A Traditionalist “race”, conscious of its nexus with the Divine as the basis of culture, endures regardless of contact with foreigners because of its inward strength. This allows it to accept foreigners not only without weakening the cultural organism but even strengthening it; because it accepts foreign input on its own terms. A Traditionalist “race” surviving over the course of millennia without succumbing to the cyclical laws of decay is the Jewish. They are the Traditionalist “race” par excellence. No better example can be had than this People that has maintained its nexus with its Divinity as the basis of cultural survival, whose religion is a race-founding and race-sustaining mythos.

Contrary to the beliefs of certain racial ideologues, including extreme Zionists and ultra-Orthodox Jews, this survival is not the result of bans on miscegenation. The Jewish law as embodied in the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, is based not on zoological race but on a race mythos. The Mosaic Law demands “race purity” in the Traditionalist sense; that of a community of belief in a heritage and a destiny.

Bizarrely, some white racists have adopted the Torah commandments as being based on genetic purity, in their belief that whites are the true Israelites. For example the priest Phineas, at the time of Moses is held in esteem by such white supremacists because he speared an Israelite and a Midianite in the act of copulation. At this time apparently the Midianites were seducing Israel away from its God, towards Baal. A purge of Israel took place. However the chapter in its entirety makes plain this was a matter of religion, not miscegenation. The nexus between Israel and the Divine was being broken by the influence of “the daughters of Moab.” Israel’s Divinity is recorded as having threatened wrath because of “my insistence on exclusive devotion.” The Divine nexus was established for eternity with the line of Phineas because he had “not tolerated any rivalry towards his god”. Moses himself had married the daughter of a Midianite priest, so the issue with the Midianites was clearly religious, and specifically that such foreign influences would break Israel’s nexus with the Divine that renders them a “special people”. Where marriages with Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, et al are prohibited it is because this nexus would be subverted. However, in the same book Deuteronomy, where the Israelite war code is being established, when a city has been defeated the adult males are to be eliminated, and the women and children are to be taken to be grafted on to Israel. The commandments for this type of “scorched earth policy” were based on preventing foreigners from teaching Israel their religions. There are precise laws as to marrying a non-Israelitish captive woman, who after a month of mourning for the deaths of her family, will have the marriage consummated and thereby become part of Israel.

Jeremiah (ca. 600 B.C.), son of the high priest Hilkiah, was one of the most significant voices against culture-decay, analogous to Ipuwer the Egyptian sage, Titus Livius, and Cato the Censor, in Rome, and our own Spengler and Evola. He warned that Israel would prosper while the nexus with Tradition and ipso facto with the Divine was maintained; Israel would fall physically if it fell away morally from that Tradition. Jeremiah saw the destruction of the Temple of Solomon and the carrying into Babylonian captivity of Judah. As with the other Civilisations that have fallen, the first symptom had been a subversion of its founding religion. Interestingly, religious decay would be quickly proceeded by an invasion of foreigners, reminiscent of Ipuwer’s warning of Egypt’s invasion by “Asiatics”. Hence, Jeremiah warns that invasion is imminent as a punishment for Israel’s departure from the Traditional faith: “I will pronounce my judgments on my people because of their wickedness in forsaking me, in burning incense to other gods and in worshiping what their hands have made”. From their self-styled role as a Holy People, they had fallen from the oath of their forefathers, Jeremiah/YHWH admonishing: “The priests did not ask, ‘Where is the LORD?’ Those who deal with the law did not know me; the leaders rebelled against me. The prophets prophesied by Baal, following worthless idols. ‘Therefore I bring charges against you again,’ declares the LORD. ‘And I will bring charges against your children’s children’”. Jeremiah states that the priesthood has become corrupted, from whence the rot proceeds downward. “The prophets prophesy lies, the priests rule by their own authority, and my people love it this way. But what will you do in the end?” Specifically, all of Israel had become motivated by greed. The admonition was to stand at the “crossroads” as to what paths to follow, and choose “the ancient paths”.

“From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit. They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace. Are they ashamed of their detestable conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush. So they will fall among the fallen; they will be brought down when I punish them,” says the LORD. This is what the LORD says: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. But you said, ‘We will not walk in it’”.

Greed, or what we now call materialism, has been the common factor of the fall of Civilisations, referred to by sages and philosophers up to our own Spengler, Brooks Adams, and Evola. The other common factor, as we have seen, has been the corruption of religion and the priestly caste, the priests and the prophets being condemned by Jeremiah.

The perennial survival of the Israelites is based on their adherence to Tradition. Prophets such as Jeremiah are the Jews’ constant warning to stay true to their “ancient paths” or destruction will result. The Jews worldwide have had, when not a King over Israel, the focus of a coming King-Messiah, Jerusalem, the Ark of the Covenant, and the Temple of Solomon (including the plans to rebuild the Temple as another focus for the future) as their world axial points, and the Mosaic Law as a universal code of living across time and place.These axial points have formed and maintained the Jews as a metaphysical race. Whatever others might think of some of their laws and beliefs their maintenance of a Traditional nexus has allowed them to supersede the cyclic laws of decay perhaps like no other people, to overcome decline and be restored, while paradoxically being the carriers of cultural pathogens among other civilisations (Marxism, Freudianism).

What the genetics of races shows, past and present, is that miscegenation has not been a cause for the collapse of civilisations. Perhaps dysgenics might cause such a collapse, but hitherto there seems scant evidence for it. By focusing to the point of ideological obsession and dogma on the assume causes of culture-death being that of miscegenation, the actual causes are overlooked. Perhaps civilisation, theoretically, might die through dysgenics, whether racial or otherwise, but it seems that before such a dysgenic process has ever taken place the morphological laws of organic life and death have intervened as witnessed by those such as Livy, Cato, Ibn Khaldun, and in our time Spengler, Evola and Brooks Adams.

In many ways the Progressive Era embodies the best of white America. It was a period of compassion, community concern, attempts to raise the living standard of average Americans, a desire to achieve class harmony, to end (or at least reduce) capitalist corruption, and to create a workable, harmonious racial nationalism that would ensure the long-term fitness of American society. The concerns of the Progressives were as much for the future as they were for the present, something almost wholly lacking in contemporary American politics. These scholars, politicians, and activists thought deeply about future generations and recognized, almost to a man, the validity of race science and the crucial role race plays in the historical trajectory of any country.

Thomas Leonard, a research scholar and lecturer in economics at Princeton University, has written an interesting history of the interaction between race, eugenics, and economics in the context of the Progressive movement. It is broadly informative and happily lacking the willful opacity of much contemporary scholastic writing, thus making it accessible to a wide audience. Unfortunately, yet unsurprisingly, this book begins with a blatant lie upon which he constructs his narrative: “Eugenics and race science are today discredited” (p. xiv). As such, the book is fundamentally flawed. Dr. Leonard offers no evidence whatsoever as to why Progressive notions of racial health and eugenics were wrong but, in keeping with contemporary academic fashion, merely resorts to shaming words and moral judgments rather than even a cursory investigation into the validity of the claims.

The book provides a detailed history of the many important Progressive intellectuals who believed that race was a fundamental concern and how they thought it should be dealt with politically, socially, and economically. The Progressives are perhaps the best example of a genuine American attempt to transcend the awkward political dichotomy of Left and Right for the sake of the greater good and a vision of a better and healthier future. Progressive diagnoses and predictions of racial degeneration and a dystopian future were so accurate that one suspects this book, to the extent it is read by objective and open-minded readers, will emphasize rather than deemphasize the importance of these issues.

The first chapter, entitled “Redeeming American Economic Life,” the author sets the context for the development of Progressivism by describing their reaction to the cycle of boom and bust of the dramatically expanding postbellum American economy: the rapid industrialization and urbanization of American society; and the tensions between labor, farmers, and capitalists. Despite the range of attitudes within the Progressive movement towards possible solutions to the problems faced at this time, Progressives shared three things in common: first, discontent with liberal individualism; second, “discontent with the waste, disorder, conflict, and injustice they ascribed to industrial capitalism”; and third, a concern with the problems of monopoly (pp. 8-9). Their understanding of these issues drove them to believe in the necessity of an administrative state to remedy these root problems and their many offshoots. As Dr. Leonard writes, the “progressives had different and sometimes conflicting agendas” but “nearly all ultimately agreed that the best means to their several ends was the administrative state” (p. 9). Those intellectuals who would become Progressives began to turn their focus away from the traditional and reflective scholarly disciplines and towards active ones, i.e. economics, politics, sociology, and public administration (p. 11). This activist turn was integral to the movement.

The author traces some of this activist drive for public improvement to the “social gospel” wing of Protestantism, but as knowledge of science and the use of scientific language increasingly became a marker of intellectual sophistication, the two were eventually combined into a mutually-reinforcing reformist spirit. Following World War I, after which the West experienced something of an existential crisis, the specifically Christian reform rhetoric mostly faded, or, as the author terms it, was “socialized” (p. 13), and mostly replaced by the hard empirical language of the above-mentioned burgeoning “active” disciplines. However, the sense of missionary zeal and notions of secular “salvation” remained a hallmark of the Progressive movement. If salvation could be socialized so too could sin (p. 13). That is to say, those problems that had previously been seen at least partially as religious in nature became social. Laissez-faire capitalism, for example, was not rapacious and exploitative merely because it was a sinful system run by sinful people but because it was “scientifically” incorrect. The Bible could offer insights into social problems but ultimately the responsibility fell to the state to re-make society in accordance with Christian ethics.

In the second chapter, “Turning Illiberal,” Dr. Leonard describes the professionalization of economics, the turn away from British classical liberalism towards German economic theory, and the origins of tensions within the Progressive movement between those who believed in democracy and those who did not. Germany, by the late 19th century had become the premier destination for graduate students wishing to study political economy. Germans were on the cutting edge of this newly formalized discipline — one that was almost entirely nonexistent in American universities. In contrast to Anglo-American classical liberalism, Germans saw the economy as a “product of a nation’s unique development” and believed that its “workings were not unalterable natural laws, [but] were historically contingent and subject to change” (p. 17). The author writes:

The progressives’ German professors had taught them that economic life was historically contingent. The economy wrought by industrial capitalism was a new economy, and a new economy necessitated a new relationship between the state and economic life. Industrial capitalism, the progressives argued, required continuous supervision, investigation, and regulation. The new guarantor of American progress was to be the visible hand of an administrative state, and the duties of administration would regularly require overriding individuals’ rights in the name of the common good (pp. 21-22).

Germans had demonstrated to American students that economics could be a tool of statist reform with a sound theoretical basis. They also demonstrated that it could be a distinguished and respected career path (p. 18). Those students who returned from Germany came home with a very different conception of the role of the economy in relation to the state and, at the same time, had little competition in establishing themselves in American universities and think tanks. It was a powerful position from which to begin their activism, both in terms of knowledge and opportunity.

Just as the German view of the relationship between state and economy had informed American Progressives, so too did the German Historical School’s conception of the nation as an organism (p. 22). This, coupled with the tremendous influence of Darwinist evolutionary theory in all intellectual circles, caused a distinct shift away from American individualism. Richard Ely, founder of the American Economic Association and a highly influential Progressive, explicitly rebuked the notion that the individual comes before society. Washington Gladden, a charter member of the same organization, argued that American individualism was “a radical defect in the thinking of the average American” (p. 22). The concept of the autonomous individual was seen by Progressive economists as a relic of a soundly refuted, old-fashioned ideology. A new class of superior, scientifically-informed men had to take charge of society if it were to rid itself of such antiquated and backwards beliefs.

In the third chapter, “Becoming Experts,” the author delves deeper into the tensions between expertise and democracy, the differences between Left and Right Progressives, the building of the administrative state, and “war collectivism.” Progressives maintained that the good of the people could best be guaranteed by limiting the power of the people — or, expressed positively, by entrusting the care of the people to experts. Dr. Leonard writes: “Financial crisis, economic panic, violent labor conflict, a political war over monetary policy, and the takeoff of the industrial merger movement combined to generate a groundswell of support for economic reform” (p. 30). This convinced many important Progressive intellectuals that government service was a far more important use of their expertise than was the role of public intellectual. Activism was a crucial strategic and ideological element of their project. The future, according to Progressives, should not be left to chance. It had to be engineered, and someone had to engineer it. If one genuinely cared for future generations, a processes to guarantee their success had to be put in motion rather than simply theorized.

In his discussion of the distinction between Left and Right, Dr. Leonard accurately dismantles the problems with this dichotomous analytical tool. He writes that “progressive” is a “political term and political historians tend to an ideological lens . . . Ideology is [a] useful tool of taxonomy, but when it is reduced to one dimension, it is the enemy of nuance” (p. 38). Rather than frame Progressives as either Left or Right, he usually prefers the term “illiberal” — the belief that, contra liberalism, society takes preference over the individual. Indeed, the very concept of “reform” is often tainted with a Leftism that isn’t always quite there. Many of the positions that modern progressives hold today would be abhorrent to historical Progressives, just as many positions that conservatives hold today would be abhorrent to conservatives of the era. For example, the Progressive Republican Theodore Roosevelt was no fan of laissez-faire capitalism and favored an increase in the regulatory powers of the government, while William Graham Sumner, a conservative opponent of Progressivism, was a believer in free markets but a staunch opponent of imperialism and big business (pp. 39-40). The political battle lines of today differ greatly from those of the past, a fact which seems to validate the 19th century Germanic conception of the relationship of state, economy, and law as being historically contingent. What we think of now as Left or Right was largely absent from Progressive discourse.

Dr. Leonard goes on to discuss the creation of what he calls the “fourth branch” of government (the administrative agencies). The quintessential example of the ascendancy of the fourth branch is the Wisconsin Idea — the integration of government and academic experts in Wisconsin in order to govern the state with maximum efficiency. Many involved in the creation of this integrated system credited its success specifically with the heavy German population of the state. In his 1912 book on the subject, Charles McCarthy described the architect of the Wisconsin Idea, Robert Ely, “as a pupil of German professors, who returned from Germany with German political ideals to teach German-inspired economics at a German university (the University of Wisconsin) in the German state of Wisconsin, where the young men he most inspired were, yes, of German stock” (p. 41). The state government was, to a previously unknown degree, put in the charge of Progressive experts who created on American soil what was in effect an ethnic German state. The Progressive movement, both in theory and in practice, was distinctly Teutonic in conception.

This “fourth branch” of government was established in Washington D.C. by Woodrow Wilson and solidified during World War I by the success of “war collectivism.” The hand of the federal government was greatly strengthened at this time in order to aid the war effort. This is the period in which the income tax was established and was soon followed by corporate and inheritance taxes as well as numerous other reforms and the creation of various administrative agencies (pp. 43-45). Having established themselves as experts, the expert recommendations of the Progressives usually included the establishment of permanent regulatory agencies — “ideally an independent agency staffed by economic experts with broad discretionary powers to investigate and regulate” (p. 43). The author credits much of this to personal ambition rather than idealism, which is doubtless true to some extent but is at odds with his earlier descriptions of the visionary reformist mission of Progressives. Perhaps writing a century later it is hard not to be cynical about such things, but little in his prior discussion would indicate personal ambition as a primary motivating force. And even if it had been the case, their efforts were consistent with their ideology. Personal ambition without value-compromise can hardly be seen as a negative. But throughout the book attempts to tarnish the images of Progressives by insinuating that they were somehow morally compromised (how else to explain their illiberal views?).

Toward the end of the chapter, the author begins his discussion of race, a central concern of Progressives. It was simply understood by Progressives (and most others of the time) that blacks were incapable of freedom. Woodrow Wilson wrote that blacks were “unpracticed in liberty, unschooled in self-control, never sobered by the discipline of self-support, never established in any habit of prudence . . . insolent and aggressive, sick of work, [and] covetous of pleasure” (p. 50). The sociologist Edward Ross, in a statement the author refers to as demonstrating contempt for his “imagined inferiors” (p. 50) wrote: “One man, one vote . . . does not make Sambo equal to Socrates” (p. 50). Such statements seem to contradict the Progressive belief in the elevation of the common man (as contemporarily understood) but as Dr. Leonard points out, the “progressive goal was to improve the electorate, not necessarily expand it” (p. 50). The whole of the country would be better off if its leadership could be entrusted to a superior piece of the American electorate. This was a fundamental tension among Progressives: “Democracies need to be democratic, but they also need to function . . .” (p. 51). American democracy could not function with unintelligent people voting but, given American history, the concept of voting was not up for debate. Thus began the deliberate disenfranchisement of blacks and others deemed unfit for equal rights in American society.

In chapter four, “Efficiency in Business and Public Administration,” the author details the Progressive push for efficiency, the influence of Taylorism, and the beginning of the scientific measurement of mankind for utilitarian purposes. Objective as possible in their approach to the economy, Progressives (with few exceptions) did not regard big business itself as a problem. Scale was, for them, unrelated to efficiency. Efficiency was a goal that could be handled by experts regardless of the size of the project. The classical liberal notion of market efficiency, even if it could be demonstrated to be true, was, like Darwinian evolution, a slow and haphazard process that could be sped up and forced in entirely desirable directions with proper management. Big business was simply a fact of the new economy. As such, it was not undesirable in and of itself, but required outside guidance to achieve socially acceptable results while avoiding “market-made waste” (p. 57). Progressives famously feared monopoly because it could produce political corruption as well as reduce innovation but, as the author writes, “progressives distinguished monopoly from size, and because of this, were not antimonopoly in the populist sense of the term” (p. 57). Indeed, big business was generally thought to be inherently more efficient than small business. As with everything else, proper administration was the key to success.

The 1911 publication of Frederick Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management was a watershed moment for Progressives. It offered a scientific method for improving workplace efficiency. By measuring and analyzing everything from workplace break times to the weight of shoveled material, industry would be able to maximize efficiency down to the minute and the pound. Taylorism has since become an epithet, used to describe the dehumanizing effects of the time clock, the oppressive nature of constant managerial supervision, and the turn away from skilled labor in the workforce. However, for Progressives it promised a new approach to the workplace that could make life better for everyone. Those experts who would take charge of industry would be able to maximize the public good while minimizing the power of capitalists and financiers. Men such as the Progressive political philosopher Herbert Croly believed that Taylorism would “[put] the collective power of the group at the hands of its ablest members” (p. 62). For Progressives, scientific management was a noble goal and a model to be followed. It fit perfectly with their basic beliefs and soon spread elsewhere, including into the home, the conservation movement, and even churches (p. 66-69).

The Progressive era was the era of social science. Scholars, commissioners, politicians, and journalists set out to understand the reality of American social life through scientific methods. Few reading this will be surprised with the conclusions of virtually all of these efforts. What this research — into race, into immigration, into domestic behavior, into social conditions — demonstrated was that there was a clear correlation between race and intelligence and the ability to function in American society. Intelligence tests and vast amounts of data collected from the military and immigration centers were collected and analyzed. For Progressives, race science was obviously and demonstrably real and had to be treated with the same scientific objectivity as the economy or any other facet of human existence. America was then, as it is now, being populated rapidly with provably inferior and/or inassimilable human beings. Progressives began to warn of the dangers of Jewish and other non-white immigration to the United States, as well as the problems stemming from rapidly breeding inferior American citizens.[1]

Chapter five, entitled “Valuing Labor: What Should Labor Get?,” describes how Progressives dealt with the question of labor. They sought to determine what labor was getting, how wages were determined, and what labor should get (p. 78). Dr. Leonard writes:

For nearly all of recorded history, the notion of laborers selling their labor services for wages was nonsensical. Labor was the compelled agricultural toil of social inferiors in the service and under the command of their betters. In the United States, this remained true well into the nineteenth century. The value of labor depended on what the worker was — free or slave, man or woman, native or immigrant, propertied or hireling — not what the worker produced or wished to consume (p. 78).

The thinking behind these categories is treated with contempt by the author, of course. The idea that the labor of a black man could be worth less than that of a white man based on something external to mere prejudice against “skin color” or that the labor of an immigrant could be worth less than the labor of a citizen to those who might feel a deeper affinity for their own countrymen was, to him, symptomatic of a “hierarchy that plagued economic life” (p. 79). He relates the claims of race science with contempt but offers no justification for his disdain. But, by simply ignoring the reality of race and sex differences, the author is able to trace the concept of inferior labor back to the Greeks — as if attitudes towards labor even between similar peoples are not themselves historically contingent.

The author sees two fundamental and separate approaches to political economy throughout history: “market exchange and administrative command” (p. 79). He notes correctly that in the centuries between Socrates and Adam Smith, the market was seen as a place of chaos, disorder, Jews (he uses the semi-cryptic “Shylocks” rather than Jews), and unscrupulous persons of various sorts. The Greek prioritization of the political over the economic is, for Dr. Leonard, the source of the various manifestations of human hierarchies in Western societies and economies.[2][3] Greek men somehow just decided for no valid reason whatsoever that women should supervise the household, market services be left to foreigners, and labor relegated to non-Greeks. These were simply ideas that had “extraordinary staying power in Europe” (p. 80) and thus led to aristocracy and other unnatural hierarchies until Adam Smith blessed Europe with his belief in individualism and natural liberty. Again, the author deliberately chooses to ignore the very real biological bases for such facts of human social life. Command economies are, to the author, somehow “bad” because he sees them as having been based in ignorance and vaguely conspiratorial hierarchical social arrangements.

Enlightenment notions of individualism and liberty were, of course, central to the rhetoric of the American project. However, America did not practice what it preached (nor did it really preach “what it preached” but that is far beyond the scope of this piece): slavery existed in the South and was defended by Southerners as far more humane than the wage-slavery of the North; Northern abolitionists saw this as an absurd comparison and argued that at least free laborers could get up and leave if they were unhappy. But both saw the laborer in one form or another as being an inferior creature. This attitude was to carry through to the Progressive era. As the author puts it, “reformers still saw a bit of the slave in the wage earner, no matter how ubiquitous the employee now was” (p. 84). He goes on to note that when millions of women and immigrants joined the workforce, this reinforced the notion of the laborer as inferior.[3][4]

If the laborer is inferior, what should they be paid? Progressives believed in the power of the government to change social conditions. As such, they believed that policies could be enacted that would enable laborers to live comfortably, with enough money to be upstanding citizens and raise healthy families. Differing theories existed for how fair wages should be determined, but Progressives tended to reject the idea that wages were anything less than a “worker-citizen’s rightful claim upon his share of the common wealth produced when the laborer cooperated with the capitalist to jointly create it” (p. 86). As is always the case among economists, vigorous debate ensued. The goal was for workers to receive a living wage but how this was to be accomplished was a matter of some controversy. The author discusses some of these theoretical disagreements but concludes that the one thing that united all Progressives in this matter was the belief that “work will always go to the lowest bidder . . . there was a race to the bottom, and the cheapest labor won” (p. 88). However, he pathologizes this as an “anxiety” rather than a real problem experienced by rational people so that Progressive concerns about the intersection of economy and race be seen by the reader as a kind of irrational social “disease,” a collective neurosis with deep roots in the American (read white) psyche.

In chapter six, “Darwinism in Economic Reform,” Dr. Leonard relates how Darwinism was used by Progressives to acquire the “imprimatur of science” (p. 105). Darwinism proved to be a very flexible conceptual tool. It allowed for incorporation into various fields of thought and, within those, still more differing points of view: it was used to advocate for capitalism and for socialism; war and peace; individualism and collectivism; natalism and birth control; religion and atheism (p. 90). Darwinism and related ideas (such as Lamarckism) provided Progressives with a scientific basis upon which to argue for both economic improvement and biological improvement. There was no consensus on which aspects of Darwinism to incorporate into their logic but something the vast majority had in common was the belief in the importance of heredity and that artificial selection, as opposed to natural selection, was the most efficient means of securing a healthy society comprised of evolutionarily fit individuals.

Social Darwinism was a concept championed by believers in the free market. As the author notes, it was always a used as a pejorative and Progressives had to distance themselves from it (p. 99). They did so by challenging laissez-faire using Darwinist principles, an idea that came to be known as Reform Darwinism. The Reform Darwinists, led by the sociologist and botanist Lester Frank Ward, challenged laissez-faire by asserting that capitalists thrived in the Gilded Age because “they had traits well adapted to the Gilded Age” but that these traits were not necessarily “socially desirable” (p. 100). They also asserted that society was an organism that “had a necessary unity” but “not an inclusive one” (p. 102). An organism must always protect itself from threats and an organism must also prioritize the whole over the part. This organic model of society influenced every Progressive concern. If, for example, a corporation was a legal person entitled to the same protections as an individual citizen, then surely “the state was an even larger organism, one that encompassed and thus subsumed corporate and natural persons alike” (p. 100).

Progressives also attacked natural selection as “wasteful, slow, unprogressive, and inhumane” (p. 100). Agreeing that robber barons and rich fat cats were an example of the degenerative tendencies of capitalism, society had a duty to protect itself from such people (p. 100). Natural selection did not always lead to progress. It was environmentally contingent. Richard Ely argued that “Nature, being inefficient, gives us man, whereas society ‘gives us the ideal man'” (p. 104). The free market rewarded those who could make the system work to their advantage by any means necessary, not those who possessed traits that were desirable for a healthy, moral society. Regulation could help fix this problem. Woodrow Wilson wrote that “regulation protected the ethical businessman from having to choose between denying his conscience and retiring from business” (p. 105). Combined with German economics, German historical theory, an activist sociology, and a commitment to the benefits of efficiency, the influence of Darwinism made the development of workable eugenics policies almost a certainty.

In the seventh chapter of the book, “Eugenics and Race in Economic Reform,” Dr. Leonard provides a brief overview of the history of eugenics. He also describes how it entered American intellectual discourse and how it was applied to race science. With roots as far back as Plato and popularized by Francis Galton in the late 19th century, eugenics was the obvious solution to many of the social problems that the Progressives were tackling. The author quotes Galton for a broad explanation: “what nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly” (p. 109). The ideas of eugenicists gained mainstream traction rapidly. By the early 20th century, states were passing sterilization laws. By the end of World War I, concerns about the terrible death toll of white men had prompted many American intellectuals to worry deeply about the crisis caused by the loss of so much “superior heredity” (p. 110). American universities began teaching eugenics courses, textbooks on eugenics were written, journals were published, and societies devoted to encouraging the spread of eugenics programs and race science were created.

Francis Galton had gone so far as to declare a “Jehad [sic]” on the “customs and prejudices that impair the physical and moral qualities of our race” (p. 112). Influential Progressives like Irving Fisher and John Harvey Kellogg sought to make this a reality by creating a sort of religion out of eugenics (p. 112). Concern for the white race played an explicit part in Progressive thought. There was nothing coded about it. Like the social gospelers of early Progressivism, the eugenics movement evangelized very effectively. The concept of racial health was soon to be found virtually everywhere one turned, from women’s magazines, movies, and comic strips to “fitter family” and “better baby” contests at agricultural fairs across America (p. 113). Lothrop Stoddard published his classic The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy in 1920, and the famous Supreme Court decision in the case of Buck v. Bell in 1927 affirmed that the state had a right to sterilize individuals deemed a genetic threat to society. It is important to note that not all eugenicists were Progressives but the vast majority of Progressives were eugenicists. For them, things such as environmental conservation went hand in hand with racial “conservation.”

For Progressive eugenicists, the administrative state was the most effective defense against racial degeneration (the effects of adverse conditions on a race of people) and race suicide (the effects of a superior race being outbred by inferior races) (p. 117). Poor and uneducated whites were seen to be redeemable given the proper environmental conditions and thus genetically able to assimilate into American society. Non-whites were incapable of assimilation because of their lower intelligence and racially-specific habits and attitudes. Of particular concern was the American black population. White Progressives saw them, at best, as docile children who should be treated as such for the good of all, and, at worst, as a weight that would sap American energy and character (p. 122). Even among the handful of black Progressives, such as W.E. B. DuBois and Kelly Miller, race was seen as a problem for America. Though they rejected the notion of the genetic inferiority of blacks, they recognized that the rapidly breeding lowest IQ blacks threatened to overwhelm the elite few — the “Talented Tenth,” as DuBois famously described them (p. 122).

But non-whites were not the only concern of the Progressive eugenicists. As indicated above, racial degeneration was of great concern. Literature on degenerate families became wildly popular at this time, bringing to the American lexicon such names as the Jukes and the Kallikaks. These families (given aliases by the authors of these studies) had their histories published as warnings about the dangers of what some would now refer to as “white trash.” The contradictions here are apparent: Progressives sought to improve the conditions of the white poor while at the same time wrestling with the question of whether poor whites were genetically unfit and simply irredeemable by external measures. The latter question, however, was also asked of the rich, who some Progressives saw as even better evidence of racial degeneracy. As with every other issue, there was a certain amount of disagreement among Progressives about specific questions and how to best administer solutions, but the concerns themselves were universal.

Perhaps the greatest concern was with the effects of immigration on the American gene pool. The author subscribes to the notion of an imagined “whiteness” and, as is customary, uses the Anglo-Saxonist tendencies of Progressives to call into question the validity of race science. This is to be expected and can be ignored. But it was indeed a concern of the era, especially as immigrants poured onto American shores. Some Progressives argued that democracy had its origins in the Anglo-Saxon race and that immigration from other areas of Europe was detrimental to survival of the American way of life. Walter Rauschenbach, a “radical social gospeler” (p. 124) argued that capitalism “drew its ever-increasing strength from the survival of the unfit immigrant” (p. 125). Rauschenbach was a committed Anglo-Saxonist and such views had long held sway in Progressive circles, from social gospelers to anti-Catholics to Prohibitionists. But it does not follow that concerns about immigration were irrational because one particular group of whites at the time did not like the customs of another group of whites. Nor do these antiquated distinctions invalidate the entirety of race science, however many times they are used in attempts to do so by this author and so many others.

Chapter eight is entitled “Excluding the Unemployable.” In it the author delves into how Progressives related racial inferiority and other traits deemed as markers of inferiority to labor and wages. He writes: “The Progressive Era catalog of inferiority was so extensive that virtually any cause could locate some threat to American racial integrity” (p. 129). Obviously, non-whites were seen as a threat, but so were white alcoholics, the poor, epileptics, and others. He argues that in antebellum America, laborers knew their place and stayed there. From slaves to women, strict social and sometimes legal controls assured the maintenance of this hierarchy. Postbellum industrialization and the emancipation of slaves threatened this order: “Inferiors were now visible and perceived to be economic competitors” and were either “portrayed as the exploited dupes of the capitalist” or “as the capitalist’s accomplices” (p. 130). Those who were literally incapable of work and those who were willing to work for lower wages than “superior” Anglo-Saxon stock were given the label “unemployable.”

These “unemployables” were seen as being parasitic. They undercut wages and threatened American racial integrity. The capitalist drive towards cheap labor was certainly seen as partly to blame for this problem, but Progressive discourse began to focus more on biology than economics. Blame was increasingly shifted towards the actual laborers themselves rather than the system that encouraged them to accept lower wages. In what was known as the “living-standard theory of wages,” the unemployables were seen as being able to live on less than the average American worker due to their willingness (either racially-determined or resulting from inferior minds) to accept poor living conditions. The white American worker, it was believed, would reduce his number of children rather than sacrifice his standard of living, thereby increasing the risk of Americans being outbred by inferior stock. This line of argument gained popular currency with the sometimes violent union activism against Chinese workers. Edward Ross wrote that “should wors[e] come to the worst, it would be better for us if we were turn our guns upon every vessel bring [Asians] to our shores rather than permit them to land” (p. 135). The notion of immigrants and others being regarded as scab labor was widely accepted across the political spectrum but was central to Progressive concerns because they were able to see it as symptomatic of multiple grave problems with American society. In order to correct these problems, better methods were needed to identify and exclude the inferiors who were threatening American jobs and lowering the American quality of life.

In chapter nine, “Excluding Immigrants and the Unproductive,” Dr. Leonard examines the methods used for exclusion. The most obvious method was the use of immigration restrictions. Numerous laws were enacted either limiting or barring entirely immigration from certain parts of the world. Restrictions were also imposed by those otherwise deemed a threat to the country, i.e. anarchists, polygamists, and epileptics (p. 142). In 1905, a law was passed that prohibited contract labor altogether (companies paying immigrants to come to America in exchange for labor). A literacy test was also proposed for anyone trying to enter the country, however the effort actually failed when Woodrow Wilson inexplicably vetoed the bill in 1917. Edward Ross blamed Jews for this loss. He wrote that they were financing the anti-restrictionist campaign and pretending that it was for the benefit of all immigrants but was actually “waged by and for one race” (p. 158). But does the author investigate this claim? Of course not. It is easier to label Ross an anti-Semite and move on. To do otherwise might turn up some uncomfortable facts.

Other restrictionist actions met with success: in 1907, the Expatriation Act required American women who married foreigners to surrender their citizenship; massive federal investigations were undertaken to study the problems of immigration; and various private organizations sprung up devoted to anti-immigration advocacy. (p. 143). For Progressives, the issue of race had become one of their deepest concerns. It was, generally, either considered the main determinant of historical change, for better or for worse, or at least an extremely important one. It comes as no surprise that the founding of the United States would be interpreted through a Darwinist lens by Progressives. The author spends some time critiquing their use of Darwinist concepts to defend the original colonists as pioneers and conquerors (that is, “fit”) and later immigrants as simply following a path already tread in opportunistic fashion (“unfit”). Never mind that this is quite obviously at least partially true. He even fails to see the distinction between a colonist and an immigrant, wholeheartedly buying into the ridiculous “nation of immigrants” theory of American demographics that is so popular today.

Progressive eugenicists saw the immigration problem as an opportunity to assert their particular interests. Interest in race science grew exponentially. Various classificatory systems were proposed, studied, and refined, each of which generally had the expected hierarchies: whites at the top, blacks on the bottom. Within each category were, of course, numerous other sub-categories. But almost all races (both in the contemporary sense and in older sense meaning “ethnicity”) was charted and described in great detail. It was crucial from the standpoint of the Progressive eugenicists to use this information to prevent the race conflict that they believed would naturally arise from the intermingling of dissimilar peoples from across the globe. Even the few Progressive intellectuals who were genuinely egalitarian in outlook believed that race-based immigration policies were crucial. John Dewey, for example, supported them because he believed average Americans were too primitive to adopt his supposedly enlightened view that race was a fiction, thus making race conflict inevitable anyway (p. 153). Unsurprisingly, those who opposed immigration restrictions tended to be Jews such as Franz Boas, philosemites such as Emily Balch, and/or laissez-faire capitalists. The motives of the restrictionists are called into question by the author — but not those of the anti-restrictionists, of course. They were simply uniquely informed and tolerant for their time.

The above also fueled the debate over the minimum wage. It was commonly accepted that a legal minimum wage would put some people out of work. Progressives tended to see this as a good thing insofar as it removed inferior laborers from the job market. Dr. Leonard writes: “It deterred immigrants and other inferiors from entering the labor force, and it idled inferior workers already employed. The minimum wage detected the inferior employee, whether immigrant, female, or disabled, so that he or she could be scientifically dealt with” (p. 161). Ways in which these inferiors could be dealt with “scientifically” included simple things such the return of formerly-employed women to the home and far more complex solutions such as labor colonies for the unfit and forced sterilization. As was the case with all internecine Progressive debates, however, the thinking was always keenly focused on future generations. One particular intellectual might disagree with another about a certain policy proposal or belief, but the goal was the same: a harmonious society and healthy race. And since neither can exist without women, it was natural for Progressives to consider the role of women in society.

In the tenth and final chapter of the book, entitled “Excluding Women,” Dr. Leonard examines the views of women’s employment and civil rights within the Progressive movement. Women were always an important part of efforts at labor reform and the drive to improve various aspects of social life. But most Progressives had very strong views on the proper role of women in society. Richard Ely argued that women should be barred from the workplace (p. 170). Many, however, did not go to quite to this extreme. Efforts were made to simply limit the number of hours women were legally allowed to work, for example. The idea behind this was, of course, that women were physically weaker and needed protection from exploitative employers. But there were other issues of importance to Progressives as well, including the desire to combat prostitution. This concern was sometimes used to defend the minimum wage. If working women could make more money per hour they would be less likely to resort to prostitution to make ends meet. The obvious problem here is that the minimum wage was supposed to make certain people unemployed, and this group included women. It was assumed, however, that unemployed women would be cared for by the men in their lives, thereby providing the benefits of higher wages to men, a more appropriate environment for women, and helping to guarantee the health of the race. Whatever limitations this placed on a woman’s individual rights were explicitly justified by concern for the race.

For some Progressive feminists, male social domination had had a dysgenic effect by punishing the race’s strongest women by confining them to the household (p. 179). Most Progressives, however, believed that motherhood was the duty of women and had to be encouraged and thought such ideas absurd. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, had special contempt for those women from privileged backgrounds who did not have enough children despite being able to afford it. Referring to them as “race criminals,” he believed that such behavior was the height of selfishness (p. 180).

The debate over birth control was related to this attitude. Birth control, then as now, was mostly used by the most privileged in society and less so by the lowest classes. It thus had an obvious dysgenic effect. The author sees the synchronic concerns of Progressives with women’s health, sexual virtue, economic competition with men, and health of the race as contradictory. He writes:

If she were paid very little, she was admonished for endangering her health, risking her virtue, and threatening hereditary vigor. If she commanded a slightly higher but still modest wage, she was condemned for undercutting men’s family wages and for neglected [sic] her maternal duties. If she were well paid, she was admonished for selfishly acquiring an education, pursuing a career, and thus shirking her reproductive responsibilities to society and the race (p. 182).

Though there is a superficial tension between these things, he fails to see that there is no necessary contradiction here. It is entirely possible for women to be economically exploited laborers whose employment lowered men’s wages and for their ideal place to be in the home, nurturing the future of the race. Progressives generally saw the employment of women as a precursor to starting a family or as a result of misfortune anyway (p. 178). Sex-specific protections in the workplace, as well as a minimum wage that would displace many of them, would be a perfectly sensible goal for any state that had the future of the race as a primary focus. Dr. Leonard’s concern with finding hypocrisy in every statement relating to race and sex blinds him to reasonable conclusions. The Progressives, however, were not handicapped by ideological taboos and ultimately rejected the small, internal strain of equal-rights feminism within their ranks in favor of protecting the race. Progressives fought hard against the Equal Right Amendment of 1923, but by the mid-1920s, the Progressive Era was winding down and within a few years the zeitgeist would change considerably.

We see in the Progressive movement the last explicit, mainstream advocacy for the white race on American soil. The author clearly realizes this and chooses to ignore every single claim made by Progressives that does not fit with contemporary notions of social constructivism. He quotes Progressives in order to mock them, not to investigate whether what they said had a basis in fact. One might object by saying that it is beyond the scope of the book to investigate race science itself in order to discuss its role in the Progressive era. But the book starts out with the lie that race science has been discredited and everything that follows is therefore either directly based on a lie or has a lie as its overarching context. The point of the book, however, is not to enlighten the reader about anything of substance. His goal is merely to frown upon “racists” and “sexists” with the reader, to roll his eyes at ignorant Progressives along with his academic colleagues, and pray that his book is assigned in universities across the country in order to further indoctrinate students into the secular religion of egalitarianism.

This is not to say that there are not important issues discussed in the book. Clearly, there are. Nor is any of the above meant to suggest that Progressives were correct about everything. Clearly, they were not. But one cannot help but wonder how different America would look today if the Progressives had been able to further investigate and discuss these important issues as a part of the mainstream. What would this country look like now if such ideas had not been turned into “thought crimes?” In so many ways what we see in progressives today is a complete about-face from the intellectual heritage they claim. And in so many ways what we can see in the real Progressive movement is profoundly, devastatingly prescient and of utmost relevance to the contemporary American sociopolitical landscape. These issues are just too important to be left to a hack.

Notes

1. As many readers will be aware, there was a distinct bias towards Nordics among American whites at this time. Many Southern and Eastern European whites were deemed inferior–a hammer used frequently to hit racialists over the head in arguments intended to “deconstruct” whiteness. It is also, unfortunately, still found in White Nationalist circles. Nordicism is dealt with very well by Greg Johnson here (http://www.counter-currents.com/2016/03/nordics-aryans-an...[5]).

2. One wonders how he might explain similar hierarchies in non-European civilizations.

3. How labor would have fared in the 20th century without the presence of millions of women and immigrants to bolster notions of their inferiority is a question that should be asked of every contemporary “progressive.” One might also ask why, if racial diversity is such a tremendous and obvious social good, how it is that highly-educated Progressives completely failed to realize this — especially considering that theirs was a mission to increase the standard of living in America.

mardi, 11 octobre 2011

Since the rise of physical anthropology, the definition of the term “race” has undergone several changes. In 1899, William Z. Ripley stated that, “Race, properly speaking, is responsible only for those peculiarities, mental or bodily, which are transmitted with constancy along the lines of direct physical descent.” 1 In 1916, Madison Grant described it as the “immutability of somatological or bodily characters, with which is closely associated the immutability of physical predispositions and impulses.”2 He was echoed a decade later by German anthropologist Hans F.K. Gunther, who in his Racial Elements of European History said, “A race shows itself in a human group which is marked off from every other human group through its own proper combination of bodily and mental characteristics, and in turn produces only its like.”3 According to the English-born Canadian evolutionary psychologist J. Philippe Rushton:

Each race (or variety) is characterized by a more or less distinct combination of inherited morphological, behavioral, physiological traits . . . Formation of a new race takes place when, over several generations, individuals in one group reproduce more frequently among themselves than they do with individuals in other groups. This process is most apparent when the individuals live in diverse geographic areas and therefore evolve unique, recognizable adaptations (such as skin color) that are advantageous in their specific environments.4

These examples indicate that, within the academic context (where those who still believe in “race” are fighting a losing battle with the hierophants of cultural anthropology), a race is simply a human group with distinct common physical and mental traits that are inherited.

Among white racialists, where race has more than a merely scientific importance, a deeper dimension was added to the concept: that of the spirit. In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler set forth the idea of the Apollinian, Faustian, and Magian “soul forms,” which can be understood as spiritual racial types.5 In this highly influential Spenglerian tome Imperium, Francis Parker Yockey elaborated this notion, asserting that while there are genetically related individuals within any particular human group, race itself is spiritual: it is a deeply felt sense of identity connected with a drive to perpetuate not just genes, but a whole way of life. “Race impels toward self-preservation, continuance of the cycle of generations, increase of power.”6 Spiritual race is a drive toward a collective destiny.

The spiritual side of race, however, was never systematically explained to the same extent as the physical. Its existence was, rather, merely suggested and taken for granted. It was only in the writings of the much overlooked Italian Radical Traditionalist and esotericist Julius Evola that the spiritual dimension was finally articulated in detail. One who has studied race from the biological, psychological, and social perspectives should turn to Evola’s writings for a culminating lesson on the subject. Evola’s writings provide a wealth of information that one cannot get elsewhere. Through a careful analysis of ancient literature and myths, along with anthropology, biology, history, and related subjects, Evola has pieced together a comprehensive explanation of the racial spirit.

My purpose here is simply to outline Evola’s doctrine of race. Since Evola’s life and career have been thoroughly examined elsewhere,7 the only biographical fact relevant here is that Evola’s thoughts on race were officially adopted as policy by Mussolini’s Fascist Party in 1942.8

Body and Mind

Evola’s precise definition of “race” is similar to Yockey’s: it is an inner essence that a person must “have”; this will be explained further below. In the meantime, a good starting point is Evola’s understanding of distinct human groups.

Evola agrees with the physical anthropologists that there are distinct groups with common physical traits produced by a common genotype: “the external form . . . which, from birth to birth, derives from the ‘gene’ . . . is called phenotype.”9 He refers to these groups as “races of the body,” and concurs with Gunther that suitable examples include the Nordic, Mediterranean, East Baltic, Orientalid, Negroid, and many others.10

Evola describes the “race of the soul” as the collective mental and behavioral traits of a human stock, and the outward “style” through which these are exhibited. Every race has essentially the same mental predispositions; all human peoples, for example, desire sexual satisfaction from a mate. However, each human stock manifests these inner instincts externally in a different way, and it is this “style,” as Evola terms it, which is the key component of the “race of the soul.”

To illustrate this point, compare the Spartan strategos (Nordic soul) to the Carthaginian shofet (Levantine soul)11: the Spartan considers it heroic to fight hand-to-hand with shield and spear and cowardly to attack from a distance with projectiles, whereas the Carthaginian finds it natural to employ elephants and grand siege equipment to utterly shock and scatter his enemies for an expedient victory.

The names of these races of the soul correspond to those of the body, hence a Nordic soul, a Mediterranean soul, Levantine soul, etc. Evola devotes an entire chapter in Men Among the Ruins to comparing the “Nordic” or “Aryo-Roman” soul to the “Mediterranean.” The Nordic soul is that of “‘the race of active man,’ of the man who feels that the world is presented to him as material for possession and attack.”12 It is the character of the quintessential “strong and silent type”:

Among them we should include self-control, an enlightened boldness, a concise speech and determined and coherent conduct, and a cold dominating attitude, exempt from personalism and vanity . . . The same style is characterized by deliberate actions, without grand gestures; a realism that is not materialism, but rather love for the essential . . . the readiness to unite, as free human beings and without losing one’s identity, in view of a higher goal or for an idea.13

Evola also quotes Helmuth Graf von Moltke (the Elder) on the Nordic ethos: “Talk little, do much, and be more than you appear to be.”14

The Mediterranean soul is the antithesis of the Nordic. This sort of person is a vain, noisy show-off who does things just to be noticed. Such a person might even do great deeds sometimes, but they are not done primarily for their positive value, but merely to draw attention. In addition, the Mediterranean makes sexuality the focal point of his existence.15 The resemblance of this picture to the average narcissistic, sex- and celebrity-obsessed American of today – whether genetically Nordic or Mediterranean – is striking. One need only watch American Idol or browse through the profiles of Myspace.com to see this.

Race of the Spirit

The deepest and therefore most complicated aspect of race for Evola is that of the “spirit.” He defines it as a human stock’s “varying attitude towards the spiritual, supra-human, and divine world, as expressed in the form of speculative systems, myths, and symbols, and the diversity of religious experience itself.”16 In other words, it is the manner in which different peoples interact with the gods as conveyed through their cultures; a “culture” would include rituals, temple architecture, the role of a priesthood (or complete lack thereof), social hierarchy, the status of women, religious symbolism, sexuality, art, etc. This culture, or worldview, is not simply the product of sociological causes, however. It is the product of something innate within a stock, a “meta-biological force, which conditions both the physical and the psychical structures” of its individual members.17

The “meta-biological force” in question has two different forms. The first corresponds to an id or a collective unconscious, a son of group mind-spirit that splinters off into individual spirits and enters a group member’s body upon birth. Evola describes it as “subpersonal” and belonging “to nature and the infernal world.”18 Most ancient peoples, as he explains, depicted this force symbolically in their myths and sagas; examples would include the animal totems of American aborigines, the ka of the Pharaonic Egyptians, or the lares of the Latin peoples. The “infernal” nature of the latter example was emphasized by the fact that the lares were believed to be ruled over by the underground deity named Mania.19 When a person died, this metaphysical element would be absorbed back into the collective from whence it came, only to be recycled into another body, but devoid of a recollection of its former life.

The second form, superior to the first, is one that does not exist in every stock naturally, or in every member of a given stock; it is an otherworldly force that must be drawn into the blood of a people through the practice of certain rites. This action corresponds to the Hindu notion of “realizing the Self,” or experiencing a oneness with the divine source of all existence and order (Brahman). Such a task can only be accomplished by a gifted few, who by making this divine connection undergo an inner transformation. They became aware of immutable principles, in the name of which they go on to forge their ethnic kin into holistic States – microcosmic versions of the transcendental principle of Order itself. Thus, the Brahmins and Kshatriyas of India, the patricians of Rome, and the samurai of Japan had a “race of the spirit,” which is essential to “having race” itself. Others may have the races of body and soul, but race of the spirit is race par excellence.

Transcendence is experienced differently by different ethnic groups. As a result, different understandings of the immutable arise across the world; from these differences emerge several “races of the spirit.” Evola focuses on two in particular. The first is the “telluric spirit” characterized by a deep “connection to the soul.” This race worships the Earth in its various cultural manifestations (Cybele, Gaia, Magna Mater, Ishtar, Inanna, etc.) and a consort of “demons.” Their view of the afterlife is fatalistic: the individual spirit is spawned from the Earth and the returns to the Earth, or to the infernal realm of Mania, upon death, with no possibility.20 Their society is matriarchal, with men often taking the last names of their mothers and familial descent being traced through the mother. In addition, women often serve as high priestesses. The priesthood, in fact, is given preeminence, whereas the aristocratic warrior element is subordinated, if it exists at all.

This race has had representatives in all the lands of Europe, Asia, and Africa that were first populated by pre-Aryans: the Iberians, Etruscans, Pelasgic-Minoans, Phoenicians, the Indus Valley peoples, and all others of Mediterranean, Oriental, and Negroid origin. The invasions of Aryan stock would introduce to these peoples a diametrically opposed racial spirit: the “Solar” or “Olympian” race.

The latter race worships the heavenly god of Order, manifested as Brahman, Ahura-Mazda, Tuisto (the antecedent of Odin), Chronos, Saturn, and the various sun deities from America to Japan. Its method of worship is not the self-prostration and humility practiced by Semites, or the ecstatic orgies of Mediterraneans, but heroic action (for the warriors) and meditative contemplation (for the priests), both of which establish a direct link with the divine. Olympian societies are hierarchical, with a priestly caste at the top, followed by a warrior caste, then a caste of tradesmen, and finally a laboring caste. The ruler himself assumes the dual role of priest and warrior, which demonstrates that the priesthood did not occupy the helm of society as they did among telluric peoples. Finally, the afterlife was not seen as an inescapable dissolution into nothingness, but as one of two potential conclusions of a test. Those who live according to the principles of their caste, without straying totally from the path, and who come to “realize the Self,” experience a oneness with God and enter a heavenly realm that is beyond death. Those who live a worthless, restless existence that places all emphasis on material and physical things, without ever realizing the presence of the divine Self within all life,, undergoes the “second death,”21 or the return to the collective racial mind-spirit mentioned earlier.

The Olympian race has appeared throughout history in the following forms: in America as the Incas; in Europe and Asia as the Indo-European speaking peoples; in Africa as the Egyptians, and in the Far East as the Japanese. Generally, this race of the spirit has been carried by waves of phenotypically Nordic peoples, which will be explained further below.

Racial Genesis

Of considerable importance to Evola’s racial worldview is his explanation of human history. Contrary to the views of most physical anthropologists and archaeologists, and even many intellectual white racialists, humanity did not evolve from a primitive, simian ancestor, and then branch off into different genetic populations. Evolution itself is a fallacy to Evola, who believed it to be rooted in the equally false ideology of progressivism: “We do not believe that man is derived from the ape by evolution. We belive that the ape is derived from man by involution. We agree with De Maistre that savage peoples are not primitive peoples, but rather the degenerating remnants of more ancient races that have disappeared.22

Evola argues in many of his works, like Bal Ganghadar Tilak and Rene Guenon before him, that the Aryan peoples of the world descend from a race that once inhabited the Arctic. In “distant prehistory” this land was the seat of a super-civilization – “super” not for its material attainments, but for its connection to the gods – that has been remembered by various peoples as Hyperborea, Airyana-Vaego, Mount Meru, Tullan, Eden, and other labels; Evola uses the Hellenic rendition “Hyperborea” more than the rest, probably to remain consistent and avoid confusion among his readers. The Hyperboreans themselves, as he explains, were the original bearers of the Olympian racial spirit.

Due to a horrific cataclysm, the primordial seat was destroyed, and the Hyperboreans were forced to migrate. A heavy concentration of refugees ended up at a now lost continent somewhere in the Atlantic, where they established a new civilization that corresponded to the “Atlantis” of Plato and the “Western land” of the Celts and other peoples. History repeated itself, and ultimately this seat was also destroyed, sending forth and Eastward-Westward wave of migrants. As Evola notes, this particular wave “[corresponded[ to Cro-Magnon man, who made his appearance toward the end of the glacial age in the Western part of Europe,"23 thus leading some historical evidence to his account. This "pure Aryan" stock would ultimately become the proto-Nordic race of Europe, which would then locally evolve into the multitude of Nordic stocks who traveled across the world and founded the grandest civilizations, from Incan Peru to Shintoist Japan.

Evola spends less time tracing the genesis of nonwhite peoples, which he consistently refers to as "autochthonous," "bestial," and "Southern" races." In his seminal work Revolt Against the Modern World, he says that the "proto-Mongoloid and Negroid races ... probably represented the last residues of the inhabitants of a second prehistoric continent, now lost, which was located in the South, and which some designated as Lemuria."24 In contrast to the superior Nordic-Olympians, these stocks were telluric worshippers of the Earth and its elemental demons. Semites and other mixed races, Evola asserts, are the products of miscegenation between Atlantean settlers and these Lemurian races. Civilizations such as those of the pre-Hellenes, Mohenjo-Daro, pre-dynastic Egyptians, and Phoenicians, among countless others, were founded by mixed peoples.

Racialism in Practice

Racialist movements from National Socialist Germany to contemporary America have tended to emphasize preserving physical racial types. While phenotypes were important to Evola, his foremost goal for racialism was to safeguard the Olympian racial spirit of European man. It was from this spirit that the greatest Indo-European civilizations received the source of their leadership, the principles around which they centered their lives, and thus the wellspring of their vitality. While de Gobineau, Grant, and Hitler argued that blood purity was the determining factor in the life of a civilization, Evola contended that "Only when a civilization's 'spiritual race' is worn out or broken does its decline set in."25 Any people who manages to maintain a physical racial ideal with no inner spiritual substance is a race of "very beautiful animals destined to work,"26 but not destined to produce a higher civilization.

The importance of phenotypes is described thusly: "The physical from is the instrument, expression, and symbol of the psychic form."27 Evola felt that it would only be possible to discover the desired spiritual type (Olympian) through a systematic examination of physical types. Even to Evola, a Sicilian born, the best place to look in this regard was the "Aryan or Nordic-Aryan body"; as he mentions on several occasions, it was, after all, this race that carried the Olympian Tradition across the world. He called this process of physical selection "racism of the first degree," which was the first of three stages.

Once the proper Nordic phenotype was identified, various "appropriate" tests comprising racism of the second and third degrees would be implemented to determine a person's racial soul and spirit.28 Evola never laid out a specific program for this, but makes allusions in his works to assessments in which a person's political and racial opinions would be taken into account. In his Elements of Racial Education, he asserts that "The one who says yes to racism is one in which race still lives," and that one who has race is intrinsically against democratic ideals. He also likens true racism to the "classical spirit," which is rooted in "exaltation of everything which has form, face, and individuation, as opposed to what is formless, vague, and undifferentiated."29 Keep in mind that for Evola, "having race" is synonymous with having the "Olympian race" of the spirit. Upon discovering a mentality that fits the criteria for soul and spirit, a subsequent education of "appropriate disciplines" would be carried out to ensure that the racial spirit within this person is "maintained and developed." Through such trials, conducted on a wide scale, a nation can determine those people within it who embody the racial ideal and the capacity for leadership.

Protecting and developing the Nordic-Olympians was primary for Evola, but his racialism had other goals. He sought to produce the "unified type," or a person in whom the races of body, soul, and spirit matched one another and worked together harmoniously. For example: "A soul which experiences the world as something before which it takes a stand actively, which regards the world as an object of attack and conquest, should have a face which reflects by determined and daring features this inner experience, a slim, tall, nervous, straight body - an Aryan or Nordic-Aryan body."30

This was because "it is not impossible that physical appearances peculiar to a given race may be accompanied by the psychic traits of a different race."31 To Evola, if people chose mates on the basis of physical features alone, there is a good chance that various mental and spiritual elements would become intermingled and generate a dangerous confusion; there would be Nordics with Semitic mental characteristics and Asiatic spiritual predispositions, Alpines with Nordic proclivities and fatalistic religious attitudes, and so on. Such a mixture was what Evola considered to be a mongrel type, in whom "cosmopolitan myths of equality" become manifested mentally, thus paving the way for the beasts of democracy and communism to permeate the nation and take hold.

Evola cared more about the aristocratic racial type, but he did not want the populace to become a bastardized mass: "We must commit ourselves to the task of applying to the nation as a whole the criteria of coherence and unity, of correspondence between outer and inner elements."32 If the aristocracy had as its subjects a blob of spiritless, internally broken people, the nation would have no hope. For the Fascist state, he promoted an educational campaign to ensure that the peoples of Italy selected their mates appropriately, looking for both appearances and behavior; non-Europeans would of course be excluded entirely. The school system would play its role, as would popular literature and films.33

Another way to develop the "inner race" is through combat. Not combat in the modern sense of pressing a button and instantly obliterating a hundred people, but combat as it unfolds in the trenches and on the battlefield, when it is man against man, as well as man against his inner demons. Evola writes, "the experience of war, and the instincts and currents of deep forces which emerge through such an experience, give the racial sense a right, fecund direction."34 Meanwhile, the comfortable bourgeois lifestyle and its pacifist worldview lead to the crippling of the inner race, which will ultimately become extinguished if external damage is thenceforth inflicted (via intermixing with inferior elements).

Conclusion

American racialists have much to gain from an introduction to Evola's thoughts on race. In the American context, racialism is virtually devoid of any higher, spiritual element; many racialists even take pride in this. There are, without a doubt, many racialists who consider themselves devout Catholics or Protestants, and they may even be so. However, the reality of race as a spiritual phenomenon is given little attention, if any at all. For whatever reason, American racialists are convinced that the greatness of Western civilization, evinced by its literature, architecture, discoveries, inventions, conquests, empires, political treatises, economic achievements, and the like, like solely in the mental characteristics of its people. For instance, the Romans erected the coliseum, the English invented capitalism, and the Greeks developed the Pythagorean theorem simply because they all had high IQs. When one compares the achievements of different Western peoples, and those of the West to the East, however, this explanation appears inadequate.

Intelligence alone cannot explain the different styles that are conveyed through the culture forms of different peoples; the Greeks' Corinthian order on the one hand, and the Arabs' mosques and minarets on the other, are not results of mere intellect. Sociological explanations do not work either; the Egyptians and Mayans lived in vastly different environments, yet both evoked their style through pyramids and hieroglyphs. The only explanation of these phenomena is that there is something deeper within a folk, something deeper and more powerful than bodily structures and mental predispositions. As Evola elucidates through his multitude of works - themselves the result of intense study of ancient and modern texts from every discipline imaginable - race has a "super-biological" aspect: a spiritual force. Ancient peoples understood this reality and conveyed it through their myths: the Romans used the lares; the Mayans used totemic animal symbols; the Persians used the fravashi, which were synonymous with the Nordic valkyries;35 the Egyptians used the ka; and the Hindus in the Bhagavad-Gita used Lord Krishna.

To better understand the spiritual side of race, the best place to look is Julius Evola. Through his works, which have greatly influenced the European New Right, Evola dissects and examines the concept of the Volksgeist, or racial spirit. It is the supernatural force that animates the bodies of a given race and stimulates the wiring in their brains. It is the substance from which cultures arise, and from which an aristocracy materializes to raise those cultures to higher civilizations. Without it, a race is simply a tribe of automatons that feed and copulate.

When the super biological element that is the center and the measure of true virility is lost, people can call themselves men, but in reality they are just eunuchs and their paternity simply reflects the quality of animals who, blinded by instinct, procreate randomly other animals, who in turn are mere vestiges of existence.36

Nowhere would Evola's racial ideas be more valuable than in the United States, a land in which the idea of transcendent realities is mocked, if not violently attacked. Even American racialists, who nostalgically look back to "better" times when people were more "traditional," are completely unaware of how the Aryan Tradition, in its purest form, understand the concept of race. Many of these people claim to be "Aryan" while simultaneously calling themselves "atheist" or "agnostic," although in ancient societies, one needed to practice the necessary religious rites and undergo certain trials before having the right to style oneself an Aryan. Hence the need for these "atheist Aryans" to become more familiar with Julius Evola.

Michael Bell writes about race and popular culture from a Radical Traditionalist point of view.

vendredi, 11 février 2011

Julius Evola’s Concept of Race:A Racism of Three Degrees

Since the rise of physical anthropology, the definition of the term “race” has undergone several changes. In 1899, William Z. Ripley stated that, “Race, properly speaking, is responsible only for those peculiarities, mental or bodily, which are transmitted with constancy along the lines of direct physical descent.”[1]

In 1916, Madison Grant described it as the “immutability of somatological or bodily characters, with which is closely associated the immutability of psychical predispositions and impulses.”[2] He was echoed a decade later by German anthropologist Hans F. K. Günther, who in his Racial Elements of European History said, “A race shows itself in a human group which is marked off from every other human group through its own proper combination of bodily and mental characteristics, and in turn produces only its like.”[3]

According to the English-born Canadian evolutionary psychologist J. Philippe Rushton:

Each race (or variety) is characterized by a more or less distinct combination of inherited morphological, behavioral, physiological traits. . . . Formation of a new race takes place when, over several generations, individuals in one group reproduce more frequently among themselves than they do with individuals in other groups. This process is most apparent when the individuals live in diverse geographic areas and therefore evolve unique, recognizable adaptations (such as skin color) that are advantageous in their specific environments.[4]

These examples indicate that, within the academic context (where those who still believe in “race” are fighting a losing battle with the hierophants of cultural anthropology), a race is simply a human group with distinct common physical and mental traits that are inherited.

Among white racialists, where race has more than a merely scientific importance, a deeper dimension was added to the concept: that of the spirit. In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler set forth the idea of the Apollinian, Faustian, and Magian “soul forms,” which can be understood as spiritual racial types.[5] In his highly influential Spenglerian tome Imperium, Francis Parker Yockey elaborated this notion, asserting that while there are genetically related individuals within any particular human group, race itself is spiritual: it is a deeply felt sense of identity connected with a drive to perpetuate not just genes, but a whole way of life. “Race impels toward self-preservation, continuance of the cycle of generations, increase of power.”[6] Spiritual race is a drive toward a collective destiny.

The spiritual side of race, however, was never systematically explained to the same extent as the physical. Its existence was, rather, merely suggested and taken for granted. It was only in the writings of the much overlooked Italian Radical Traditionalist and esotericist Julius Evola that the spiritual dimension was finally articulated in detail. One who has studied race from the biological, psychological, and social perspectives should turn to Evola’s writings for a culminating lesson on the subject. Evola’s writings provide a wealth of information that one cannot get elsewhere. Through a careful analysis of ancient literature and myths, along with anthropology, biology, history, and related subjects, Evola has pieced together a comprehensive explanation of the racial spirit.

My purpose here is simply to outline Evola’s doctrine of race. Since Evola’s life and career have been thoroughly examined elsewhere,[7] the only biographical fact relevant here is that Evola’s thoughts on race were officially adopted as policy by Mussolini’s Fascist party in 1942.[8]

Body and Mind

Evola’s precise definition of “race” is similar to Yockey’s: it is an inner essence that a person must “have”; this will be explained further below. In the meantime, a good starting point is Evola’s understanding of distinct human groups.

Evola agrees with the physical anthropologists that there are distinct groups with common physical traits produced by a common genotype: “the external form . . . which, from birth to birth, derives from the ‘gene’ . . . is called phenotype.”[9] He refers to these groups as “races of the body,” and concurs with Günther that suitable examples include the Nordic, Mediterranean, East Baltic, Orientalid, Negroid, and many others.[10]

Evola decribes the “race of the soul” as the collective mental and behavioral traits of a human stock, and the outward “style” through which these are exhibited. Every race has essentially the same mental predispositions; all human peoples, for example, desire sexual satisfaction from a mate. However, each human stock manifests these inner instincts externally in a different way, and it is this “style,” as Evola terms it, which is the key component of the “race of the soul.”

To illustrate this point, compare the Spartan strategos (Nordic soul) to the Carthaginian shofet (Levantine soul)[11]: the Spartan considers it heroic to fight hand-to-hand with shield and spear and cowardly to attack from a distance with projectiles, whereas the Carthaginian finds it natural to employ elephants and grand siege equipment to utterly shock and scatter his enemies for an expedient victory.

The names of these races of the soul correspond to those of the body, hence a Nordic soul, a Mediterranean soul, Levantine soul, etc. Evola devotes an entire chapter in Men Among the Ruins to comparing the “Nordic” or “Aryo-Roman” soul to the “Mediterranean.” The Nordic soul is that of “‘the race of the active man,’ of the man who feels that the world is presented to him as material for possession and attack.”[12] It is the character of the quintessential “strong and silent type”:

Among them we should include self-control, an enlightened boldness, a concise speech and determined and coherent conduct, and a cold dominating attitude, exempt from personalism and vanity. . . . The same style is characterized by deliberate actions, without grand gestures; a realism that is not materialism, but rather love for the essential . . . the readiness to unite, as free human beings and without losing one’s identity, in view of a higher goal or for an idea.[13]

Evola also quotes Helmuth Graf von Moltke (the Elder) on the Nordic ethos: “Talk little, do much, and be more than you appear to be.”[14]

The Mediterranean soul is the antithesis of the Nordic. This sort of person is a vain, noisy show-off who does things just to be noticed. Such a person might even do great deeds sometimes, but they are not done primarily for their positive value, but merely to draw attention. In addition, the Mediterranean makes sexuality the focal point of his existence.[15] The resemblance of this picture to the average narcissistic, sex- and celebrity-obsessed American of today—whether genetically Nordic or Mediterranean—is striking. One need only watch American Idol or browse through the profiles of Myspace.com to see this.

Race of the Spirit

The deepest and therefore most complicated aspect of race for Evola is that of the “spirit.” He defines it as a human stock’s “varying attitude towards the spiritual, supra-human, and divine world, as expressed in the form of speculative systems, myths, and symbols, and the diversity of religious experience itself.”[16] In other words, it is the manner in which different peoples interact with the gods as conveyed through their cultures; a “culture” would include rituals, temple architecture, the role of a priesthood (or complete lack thereof), social hierarchy, the status of women, religious symbolism, sexuality, art, etc. This culture, or worldview, is not simply the product of sociological causes, however. It is the product of something innate within a stock, a “meta-biological force, which conditions both the physical and the psychical structures” of its individual members.[17]

The “meta-biological force” in question has two different forms. The first corresponds to an id or a collective unconscious, a sort of group mind-spirit that splinters off into individual spirits and enters a group member’s body upon birth. Evola describes it as “subpersonal” and belonging “to nature and the infernal world.”[18] Most ancient peoples, as he explains, depicted this force symbolically in their myths and sagas; examples would include the animal totems of American aborigines, the ka of the Pharaonic Egyptians, or the lares of the Latin peoples. The “infernal” nature of the latter example was emphasized by the fact that the lares were believed to be ruled over by an underground deity named Mania.[19] When a person died, this metaphysical element would be absorbed back into the collective from whence it came, only to be recycled into another body, but devoid of any recollection of its former life.

The second form, superior to the first, is one that does not exist in every stock naturally, or in every member of a given stock; it is an otherworldly force that must be drawn into the blood of a people through the practice of certain rites. This action corresponds to the Hindu notion of “realizing the Self,” or experiencing a oneness with the divine source of all existence and order (Brahman). Such a task can only be accomplished by a gifted few, who by making this divine connection undergo an inner transformation. They become aware of immutable principles, in the name of which they go on to forge their ethnic kin into holistic States—microcosmic versions of the transcendent principle of Order itself. Thus, the Brahmins and Kshatriyas of India, the patricians of Rome, and the samurai of Japan had a “race of the spirit,” which is essential to “having race” itself. Others may have the races of body and soul, but race of the spirit is race par excellence.

Transcendence is experienced differently by different ethnic groups. As a result, different understandings of the immutable arise across the world; from these differences emerge several “races of the spirit.” Evola focuses on two in particular. The first is the “telluric spirit” characterized by a deep “connection to the soil.” This race worships the Earth in its various cultural manifestations (Cybele, Gaia, Magna Mater, Ishtar, Inanna, etc.) and a consort of “demons.” Their view of the afterlife is fatalistic: the individual spirit is spawned from the Earth and then returns to the Earth, or to the infernal realm of Mania, upon death, with no other possibility.[20] Their society is matriarchal, with men often taking the last names of their mothers and familial descent being traced through the mother. In addition, women often serve as high priestesses. The priesthood, in fact, is given preeminence, whereas the aristocratic warrior element is subordinated, if it exists at all.

This race has had representatives in all the lands of Europe, Asia, and Africa that were first populated by pre-Aryans: the Iberians, Etruscans, Pelasgic-Minoans, Phoenicians, the Indus Valley peoples, and all others of Mediterranean, Oriental, and Negroid origin. The invasions of Aryan stock would introduce to these peoples a diametrically opposed racial spirit: the “Solar” or “Olympian” race.

The latter race worships the heavenly god of Order, manifested as Brahman, Ahura-Mazda, Tuisto (the antecedent of Odin), Chronos, Saturn, and the various sun deities from America to Japan. Its method of worship is not the self-prostration and humility practiced by Semites, or the ecstatic orgies of Mediterraneans, but heroic action (for the warriors) and meditative contemplation (for the priests), both of which establish a direct link with the divine. Olympian societies are hierarchical, with a priestly caste at the top, followed by a warrior caste, then a caste of tradesmen, and finally a laboring caste. The ruler himself assumes the dual role of priest and warrior, which demonstrates that the priesthood did not occupy the helm of society as they did among telluric peoples. Finally, the afterlife was not seen as an inescapable dissolution into nothingness, but as one of two potential conclusions of a test. Those who live according to the principles of their caste, without straying totally from the path, and who come to “realize the Self,” experience a oneness with God and enter a heavenly realm that is beyond death. Those who live a worthless, restless existence that places all emphasis on material and physical things, without ever realizing the presence of the divine Self within all life, undergoes the “second death,”[21] or the return to the collective racial mind-spirit mentioned earlier.

The Olympian race has appeared throughout history in the following forms: in America as the Incas; in Europe and Asia as the Indo-European speaking peoples; in Africa as the Egyptians; and in the Far East as the Japanese. Generally, this race of the spirit has been carried by waves of phenotypically Nordic peoples, which will be explained further below.

Racial Genesis

Of considerable importance to Evola’s racial worldview is his explanation of human history. Contrary to the views of most physical anthropologists and archaeologists, and even many intellectual white racialists, humanity did not evolve from a primitive, simian ancestor, and then branch off into different genetic populations. Evolution itself is a fallacy to Evola, who believed it to be rooted in the equally false ideology of progressivism: “We do not believe that man is derived from the ape by evolution. We believe that the ape is derived from man by involution. We agree with De Maistre that savage peoples are not primitive peoples, but rather the degenerating remnants of more ancient races that have disappeared.”[22]

Evola argues in many of his works, like Bal Ganghadar Tilak and René Guénon before him, that the Aryan peoples of the world descend from a race that once inhabited the Arctic. In “distant prehistory” this land was the seat of a super-civilization—“super” not for its material attainments, but for its connection to the gods—that has been remembered by various peoples as Hyperborea, Airyana-Vaego, Mount Meru, Tullan, Eden, and other labels; Evola uses the Hellenic rendition “Hyperborea” more than the rest, probably to remain consistent and avoid confusion among his readers. The Hyperboreans themselves, as he explains, were the original bearers of the Olympian racial spirit.

Due to a horrible cataclysm, the primordial seat was destroyed, and the Hyperboreans were forced to migrate. A heavy concentration of refugees ended up at a now lost continent somewhere in the Atlantic, where they established a new civilization that corresponded to the “Atlantis” of Plato and the “Western land” of the Celts and other peoples. History repeated itself, and ultimately this seat was also destroyed, sending forth an Eastward-Westward wave of migrants. As Evola notes, this particular wave “[corresponded] to Cro-Magnon man, who made his appearance toward the end of the glacial age in the Western part of Europe,”[23] thus lending some historical evidence to his account. This “pure Aryan” stock would ultimately become the proto-Nordic race of Europe, which would then locally evolve into the multitude of Nordic stocks who traveled across the world and founded the grandest civilizations, from Incan Peru to Shintoist Japan.

Evola spends less time tracing the genesis of nonwhite peoples, which he consistently refers to as “autochthonous,” “bestial,” and “Southern” races. In his seminal work Revolt Against the Modern World, he says that the “proto-Mongoloid and Negroid races . . . probably represented the last residues of the inhabitants of a second prehistoric continent, now lost, which was located in the South, and which some designated as Lemuria.”[24] In contrast to the superior Nordic-Olympians, these stocks were telluric worshippers of the Earth and its elemental demons. Semites and other mixed races, Evola asserts, are the products of miscegenation between Atlantean settlers and these Lemurian races. Civilizations such as those of the pre-Hellenes, Mohenjo-Daro, pre-dynastic Egyptians, and Phoenicians, among countless others, were founded by these mixed peoples.

Racialism in Practice

Racialist movements from National Socialist Germany to contemporary America have tended to emphasize preserving physical racial types. While phenotypes were important to Evola, his foremost goal for racialism was to safeguard the Olympian racial spirit of European man. It was from this spirit that the greatest Indo-European civilizations received the source of their leadership, the principles around which they centered their lives, and thus the wellspring of their vitality. While de Gobineau, Grant, and Hitler argued that blood purity was the determining factor in the life of a civilization, Evola contended that “Only when a civilization’s ‘spiritual race’ is worn out or broken does its decline set in.”[25] Any people who manages to maintain a physical racial ideal with no inner spiritual substance is a race of “very beautiful animals destined to work,”[26] but not destined to produce a higher civilization.

The importance of phenotypes is described thusly: “The physical form is the instrument, expression, and symbol of the psychic form.”[27] Evola felt that it would only be possible to discover the desired spiritual type (Olympian) through a systematic examination of physical types. Even to Evola, a Sicilian baron, the best place to look in this regard was the “Aryan or Nordic-Aryan body”; as he mentions on several occasions, it was, after all, this race that carried the Olympian Tradition across the world. He called this process of physical selection “racism of the first degree,” which was the first of three stages.

Once the proper Nordic phenotype was identified, various “appropriate” tests comprising racism of the second and third degrees would be implemented to determine a person’s racial soul and spirit.[28] Evola never laid out a specific program for this, but makes allusions in his works to assessments in which a person’s political and racial opinions would be taken into account. In his Elements of Racial Education, he asserts that “The one who says yes to racism is one in which race still lives,” and that one who has race is intrinsically against democratic ideals. He also likens true racism to the “classical spirit,” which is rooted in “exaltation of everything which has form, face, and individuation, as opposed to what is formless, vague, and undifferentiated.”[29] Keep in mind that for Evola, “having race” is synonymous with having the “Olympian race” of the spirit. Upon discovering a mentality that fits the criteria for soul and spirit, a subsequent education of “appropriate disciplines” would be carried out to ensure that the racial spirit within this person is “maintained and developed.” Through such trials, conducted on a wide scale, a nation can determine those people within it who embody the racial ideal and the capacity for leadership.

Protecting and developing the Nordic-Olympians was primary for Evola, but his racialism had other goals. He sought to produce the “unified type,” or a person in whom the races of body, soul, and spirit matched one another and worked together harmoniously. For example: “A soul which experiences the world as something before which it takes a stand actively, which regards the world as an object of attack and conquest, should have a face which reflects by determined and daring features this inner experience, a slim, tall, nervous, straight body—an Aryan or Nordic-Aryan body.”[30]

This was important because “it is not impossible that physical appearances peculiar to a given race may be accompanied by the psychic traits of a different race.”[31] To Evola, if people chose mates on the basis of physical features alone, there is a good chance that various mental and spiritual elements would become intermingled and generate a dangerous confusion; there would be Nordics with Semitic mental characteristics and Asiatic spiritual predispositions, Alpines with Nordic proclivities and fatalistic religious attitudes, and so on. Such a mixture was what Evola considered to be a mongrel type, in whom “cosmopolitan myths of equality” become manifested mentally, thus paving the way for the beasts of democracy and communism to permeate the nation and take hold.

Evola cared more about the aristocratic racial type, but he did not want the populace to become a bastardized mass: “We must commit ourselves to the task of applying to the nation as a whole the criteria of coherence and unity, of correspondence between outer and inner elements.”[32] If the aristocracy had as its subjects a blob of spiritless, internally broken people, the nation would have no hope. For the Fascist state, he promoted an educational campaign to ensure that the peoples of Italy selected their mates appropriately, looking for both appearances and behavior; non-Europeans would of course be excluded entirely. The school system would play its role, as would popular literature and films.[33]

Another way to develop the “inner race” is through combat. Not combat in the modern sense of pressing a button and instantly obliterating a hundred people, but combat as it unfolds in the trenches and on the battlefield, when it is man against man, as well as man against his inner demons. Evola writes “the experience of war, and the instincts and currents of deep forces which emerge through such an experience, give the racial sense a right, fecund direction.”[34] Meanwhile, the comfortable bourgeois lifestyle and its pacifist worldview lead to the crippling of the inner race, which will ultimately become extinguished if external damage is thenceforth inflicted (via intermixing with inferior elements).

Conclusion

American racialists have much to gain from an introduction to Evola’s thoughts on race. In the American context, racialism is virtually devoid of any higher, spiritual element; many racialists even take pride in this. There are, without a doubt, many racialists who consider themselves devout Catholics or Protestants, and they may even be so. However, the reality of race as a spiritual phenomenon is given little attention, if any at all. For whatever reason, American racialists are convinced that the greatness of Western civilization, evinced by its literature, architecture, discoveries, inventions, conquests, empires, political treatises, economic achievements, and the like, lie solely in the mental characteristics of its people. For instance, the Romans erected the coliseum, the English invented capitalism, and the Greeks developed the Pythagorean theorem simply because they all had high IQs. When one compares the achievements of different Western peoples, and those of the West to the East, however, this explanation appears inadequate.

Intelligence alone cannot explain the different styles that are conveyed through the culture forms of different peoples; the Greeks’ Corinthian order on the one hand, and the Arabs’ mosques and minarets on the other, are not results of mere intellect. Sociological explanations do not work either; the Egyptians and the Mayans lived in vastly different environments, yet both evoked their style through pyramids and hieroglyphs. The only explanation for these phenomena is that there is something deeper within a folk, something deeper and more powerful than bodily structures and mental predispositions. As Evola elucidates through his multitude of works—themselves the result of intense study of ancient and modern texts from every discipline imaginable—race has a “super-biological” aspect: a spiritual force. Ancient peoples understood this reality and conveyed it through their myths: the Romans used the lares; the Mayans used totemic animal symbols; the Persians used the fravashi, which were synonymous with the Nordic valkyries[35]; the Egyptians used the ka; and the Hindus in the Bhagavad-Gita used Lord Krishna.

To better understand the spiritual side of race, the best place to look is Julius Evola. Through his works, which have greatly influenced the European New Right, Evola dissects and examines the concept of the Volksgeist, or racial spirit. It is the supernatural force that animates the bodies of a given race and stimulates the wiring in their brains. It is the substance from which cultures arise, and from which an aristocracy materializes to raise those cultures to higher civilizations. Without it, a race is simply a tribe of automatons that feed and copulate:

When the super biological element that is the center and the measure of true virility is lost, people can call themselves men, but in reality they are just eunuchs and their paternity simply reflects the quality of animals who, blinded by instinct, procreate randomly other animals, who in turn are mere vestiges of existence.[36]

Nowhere would Evola’s racial ideas be more valuable than in the United States, a land in which the idea of transcendent realities is mocked, if not violently attacked. Even American racialists, who nostalgically look back to “better” times when people were more “traditional,” are completely unaware of how the Aryan Tradition, in its purest form, understands the concept of race. Many of these people claim to be “Aryan” while simultaneously calling themselves “atheist” or “agnostic,” although in ancient societies, one needed to practice the necessary religious rites and undergo certain trials before having the right to style onself an Aryan. Hence the need for these “atheist Aryans” to become more familiar with Julius Evola.

vendredi, 07 mai 2010

Growing interest in English speaking countries for the Italian philosopher Julius Evola may be a sign of the revival of the awesome cultural legacy of the Western civilization (see here and here). This legacy is awkwardly termed the “traditional –revolutionary – elitist – anti-egalitarian – postmodern thought.” But why not simply call it classical thought?

The advantage of Evola, in contrast to many modern scholars of the same calibre, may be his staggering erudition that goes well beyond the narrow study of race. Evola was just as much at ease writing thick volumes about religion, language and sexuality as writing about legal issues related to international politics, or depicting decadence of the liberal system. His shortcomings are, viewed from the American academic perspective, that his prose is often not focused enough and his narrative often embraces too many topics at once. Evola was not a self-proclaimed “expert” on race — yet his erudition made him compose several impressive books on race from angles that are sorely missing among modern sociobiologists and race experts. Therefore, Evola’s works on race must be always put in a lager perspective.

In this short survey of Evola’s position on race I am using the hard cover of the French translation of Indirizzi per una educazione razziale (1941) (Eléments pour une éduction raciale, 1984) and the more expanded Sintesi di dottrina della razza (1941), (“Synthesis of the racial doctrine”), translated into German by the author himself and by Annemarie Rasch and published in Germany in 1943. To my knowledge these two books are not available in English translation. His and Rasch’s excellent German translation of Sintesi had received (in my view an awkward and unnecessary) ‘political’ title; Grundrisse der faschistischen Rassenlehre (“Outlines of the fascist racial doctrine”) and is available on line.

Race of the Body vs. Race of the Spirit

Evola writes that race represents a crucial element in the life of all humans. However, while acknowledging the clear-cut physical and biological markers of each race, he stresses over and over again the paramount importance of the spiritual and internal aspects of race — two points that are decisive for genuine racial awareness of the White man. Without full comprehension of these constituent racial parts — i.e., the “race of the soul” and the “race of the spirit” — no racial awareness is possible. Evola is adamantly opposed to conceptualizing race from a purely biological, mechanistic and Darwinian perspective. He sees that approach as dangerously reductionist, leading to unnecessary political and intellectual infighting.

Diverse causes have contributed until now to the fact that racism has become the object of propaganda entrusted to incompetent people, to individuals who are waking up any day now as racists and anti-Semites and whose simple sloganeering has replaced serious principles and information. (Eléments pour une éduction raciale,p. 15)

Evola freely uses the term ‘racism’ (razzismo)and ‘racist’ (razzista). This was quite understandable in his epoch given that these words in Europe in the early thirties of the 20th century had a very neutral meaning with no dreaded symbols of the absolute evil ascribed to them today. The same can be said of the word ‘fascism’ and even ‘totalitarianism’ — words which Evola uses in a normative manner when depicting an organic and holistic society designed for the future of the Western civilization. For Evola, the sense of racial awareness is more a spiritual endeavor and less a form of biological typology.

And in this respect, we need to repeat it; we are dealing here with a formation of a mentality, a sensibility, and not with intellectual schemes or classifications for natural science manuals. (Elémentsp. 16)

For Evola, being White is not just a matter of good looks and high IQ, or for that matter something that needs to be sported in public. Racial awareness implies a sense of mysticism combined with the knowledge of one’s family lineage as well as a spiritual effort to delve into the White man’s primordial and mythical times. This is a task, which in the age of liberal chaos, must be entrusted only to élites completely detached from any material or pecuniary temptation.

Thus, racism invigorates and renders tangible the concept of tradition; it makes the individual get used to observing in our ancestors not just a series of the more or less illustrious “dead,” but rather the expression of something still alive in ourselves and to which we are tied in our interior. We are the carriers of a heritage that has been transmitted to us and that we need to transmit – and in this spirit it is something going beyond time, something indicating, what we called elsewhere, ‘the eternal race.’ (Eléments, p.31)

In other words race is at a same time a heritage and a collective substrate. Irrespective of the fact that it expresses itself among all people, it is only among few that it attains its perfect realization and it is precisely there that the action and the significance of the individual and the personality can assert themselves. (Eléments, p.34)

Evola offers the same views in his more expanded Sintesi (Grundrisse), albeit by using a somewhat different wording. Racial awareness for Evola requires moral courage and impeccable character and not just physical prowess. It is questionable to what extent many White racists today, in a self-proclaimed “movement” of theirs, with their silly paraphernalia on public display, are capable of such a mental exercise.

Race means superiority, wholeness, decisiveness in life. There are common people and there are people “of race”. Regardless of which social status they belong to, these people form an aristocracy(Grundrisse, p.17).

In this particular regard, the racial doctrine rejects the doctrine of the environment, known to be an accessory to liberalism, to the idea of humanity and to Marxism. These false doctrines have picked up on the theory of the environment in order to defend the dogma of fundamental equality of all people. (Grundrisse, p. 17)

And further Evola writes:

Our position, when we claim that race exists as much in the body as in the spirit, goes beyond these two points of view. Race is a profound forcemanifesting itself in the realm of the body (race of the body) as in the realm of the spirit (race of the interior, race of the sprit). In its full meaning the purity of race occurs when these two manifestations coincide; in other words, when the race of the body matches the race of the spirit and when it is capable of serving the most adequate organ of expression. (p.48)

Racial-Spiritual Involution and the present Dark Ages

Evola is aware of the dangerous dichotomy between the race of the spirit and the race of the body that may occur within the same race — or, as we call it, within the same ingroup. This tragic phenomenon occurs as a result of selecting the wrong mates, miscegenation, and genetic flaws going back into the White man’s primordial times. Modern social decadence also fosters racial chaos. Evola argues that very often the “race of the body” may be perfectly pure, with the “race of the spirit” being already tainted or destroyed. This results in a cognitive clash between a distorted perception of objective reality vs. subjective reality, and which sooner or later leads to strife or civil war.

Evola harbors no illusions about master race; he advocates racial hygiene, always emphasizing the spiritual aspect of the race first. On a practical level, regarding modern White nationalists, Evola’s words are important insofar as they represent a harsh indictment of the endless bickering, petty sectarianism and petty jealousy seen so often among Whites. A White nationalist may be endowed with a perfect race of the body, but his racial spirit may be dangerously mongrelized.

Studying racial psychology is a crucial task for all White racialists — an endeavor in which Evola was greatly influenced by the German racial scholar and his contemporary Franz Ludwig Clauss.

Furthermore, a special circumstance must be singled out, confirming the already stated fact that races that have best biologically preserved the Nordic type are inwardly sometimes in a higher degree of regression than other races of the same family. Some Nordic nations — especially the Anglo-Saxons — are those in which the tradition-conditioned normal relationship between the sexes has been turned upside down. The so-called emancipation of woman — which in reality only means the mutilation and degradation of woman — has actually started out among these nations and has been most widespread among them, whereas this relationship still retains something of a tradition-based view among other nations, regardless of it its bourgeois or its conventional echo.(Grundrisse p. 84).

Evola is well aware of the complexity of understanding race as well as our still meager knowledge of the topic. He is well aware that race cannot be just the subject of biologists, but also of paleontologists, psycho-anthropologists and mystics, such as the French mystic René Guenon, whom he knew well and whom he often quotes.

Following in Evola’s footsteps we may raise a haunting question. Why individuals of the same White race, i.e. of the same White in-group frequently do not understand each other? Why is it that the most murderous wars have occurred within the same race, i.e. within the same White ingroup, despite the fact that the European ingroup is more or less biologically bonded together by mutual blood ties? One must always keep in mind that the bloodiest wars in the 20th century occurred not between two racially opposed out-groups, but often within the same White ingroup. The level of violence between Whites and Whites during the American civil war, the savagery of the intra-White civil war in Spain from 1936 to 1939, the degree of mutual hatred amidst White Europeans during WWII, and not least the recent intra-White barbarity of the Yugoslav conflict, are often incomprehensible for a member of the non-European outgroup. This remains an issue that needs to be urgently addressed by all sociobiologists. It must be pondered by all White nationalist activists all over the world.

There are actually too many cases of people who are somatically of the same race, of the same tribe, indeed who are fathers and sons of the same blood in the strict sense of the word and, yet who cannot “understand” each other.A demarcation line separates their souls; their way of feeling and judging is different and their common race of the body cannot do much about it, nor their common blood. The impossibility of mutual understanding lies therefore on the level of supra-biology (“überbiologische Ebene”). Mutual understanding and hence real togetherness, as well as deeper unity, are only possible where the common "race of the soul" and the "spirit" coexist. (Grundrisse, 89)

In order to understand his political and moral predicament, the White man must therefore delve into myths of his prehistory and look for his faults. For Evola, we are all victims of rationalism, Enlightenment and positivistic sciences that keep us imprisoned in a straitjacket of “either-or,” always in search for causal and rational explanations. Only by grasping the supraracial (superraza) meaning of ancient European myths and by using them as role models, can we come to terms with the contemporary racial chaos of the modern system.

It is absolutely crucial to grasp the living significance of such a change of perspectives inherent to racist conceptions; the superior does not derive from the inferior. In the mystery of our blood, in the depth of our most abysmal of our being, resides the ineffaceable heredity of our primordial times. This is not heredity of brutality of bestial and savage instincts gone astray, as argued by psychoanalysis, and which, as one may logically conclude, derive from “evolutionism” or Darwinism. This heredity of origins, this heredity which comes from the deepest depth of times is theheredity of the light. (Eléments72–73)

Briefly, Evola rejects the widespread idea that we have evolved from exotic African monkeys, as the standard theory of evolution goes, and which is still widely accepted by modern scientists. He believes that we have now become the tainted progeny of the mythical Hyperborean race, which has significantly racially deteriorated over the eons and which has been adrift both in time and space. Amidst the ruins of the modern world, gripped by perversion and decadence, Evola suggest for new political elites the two crucial criteria, “the character and the form of the spirit, much more than intelligence.” As a racial mystic, Evola warns:

Because the concept of the world can be much more precise with a man without instruction than with a writer; it can be more solid with a soldier, or a peasant loyal to his land, than with a bourgeois intellectual, professor, or a journalist. (quoted in Alain de Benoist’s, Vude droite, 1977, p. 435)

We could only add that the best cultural weapons for our White “super-race” are our common Indo-Aryan myths, our sagas, our will to power — and our inexorable sense of the tragic.